spec me a storage solution.

rjk

rjk

rjk

OcUK Staff
Joined
8 Aug 2007
Posts
25,567
hey guys.

currently looking to take advantage of those fancy ports on the back of my motherboard.

my current storage setup is as follows

C:\ Crucial M4 64GB - Windows & Programs
D:\ Intel 510 120GB - Steam & Other Games
E:\ WD Mybook 500GB [external] - Data, Movies, Pics, Music

QNAP TS209II with a pair of 1TB Seagate LP drives in RAID1 for backups, media etc.

now the problem I have is that the WD mybook drive I have is about 6 years old and by no means fast. it doesnt need to be, its just a data drive.
but i am looking for something with a little more capacity or even just something faster.

i have ESATA/USB3/0 combo ports on the rear of my board which i am quite interested in using. anything has to be faster than a 6 year old external drive right?

recently i have been looking into external drives and cant see anything USB3.0. looked also at 2.5 enclosures with usb3 but unsure what drive to match it to.

would I even see any benefit going esata/usb3 on a mechanical drive over my current USB2 external drive?
what drive/caddy combo would you suggest?


i guess i am after some kind of external storage that offers fast speeds over the interfaces i mention above. power over esata/usb3.0 would be a great addition as it would free up a plug, but not essential.
 
I use a USB 3.0 dock like this:

Sharkoon SATA QuickPort XT USB3.0,

But not that particular one.

I leave it permanently connected to the PC and then have several 2TB HDD's I can just slot in as needed.

The drives are much faster over USB 3.0 than USB 2.0. The Samsung SpinPoint F4 EcoGreen 2TB has a read speed of ~30MB/s over USB 2.0 and ~115MB/s over USB 3.0.

FYI eSATA doesn't provide any power over the connection and I believe USB will only power 2.5" drives.
 
ah sorry if i wasnt clear, the ports on my Z68 UD5 have a power over Esata thing. i may have misunderstood how it works.

if usb3 drives are the way to go then, what is the best caddy to go for
also what mech drive? i stopped looking at them when i went to SSD a few years back :p
 
I've got an eSata dock with a 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 and 2x USB3.0 enclosures with 3TB Seagate Barracuda XT's and I prefer the the eSata personally but only for one reason.

While the speeds are very similar when you try and access the drives the USB3.0 (both of them) take about 5-8secs to "wake up" and then after 1min of inactivity they got back to sleep again whereas the eSata drive doesn't, it's instant. For that reason alone I prefer eSata (maybe it's something in the enclosure that puts them to sleep IDK)
 
rjkoneill said:
ah sorry if i wasnt clear, the ports on my Z68 UD5 have a power over Esata thing. i may have misunderstood how it works.
Click to expand...

I've seen powered eSATA ports (eSATAp) but never any drives that can use them!


rjkoneill said:
if usb3 drives are the way to go then, what is the best caddy to go for
also what mech drive? i stopped looking at them when i went to SSD a few years back :p
Click to expand...

Caddy or dock?

With a dock you can use as many drives as you wish.

With a caddy you're limited to the one drive.

What capacity HDD?
 
probably 3.5 now with mains. essentially because the drives are cheaper.
around 500gb to 1tb.

looking at the silverstone TS07 caddy at the moment.
 
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