USB Hard Drives

Greg · 2 Mar 2006 at 09:22

Not having a clue about USB Hard Drives. I've seen a good offer on a 300GB HDD for £99.

My question is, the drive connects via USB 2.0:

1) Will it perform just as fast as an internal drive for movie storage and transfers?

2) If i were to leave it permenantly plugged in, will I still be able to 'map to it' like a normal HDD over my Network.

3) Can you partition USB HDDs like standard HDDs?

thanks

greg

Mujja · 2 Mar 2006 at 09:32

1) Will it perform just as fast as an internal drive for movie storage and transfers?

It will be a lot slower, but if you need to transfer a lot of data at once you can always remove it from the case and connect it directly to your IDE cable.

2) If i were to leave it permenantly plugged in, will I still be able to 'map to it' like a normal HDD over my Network.

Yes, and over the LAN performance won't be an issue because USB2 is 480Mpbs and your LAN will be 100Mpbs.

3) Can you partition USB HDDs like standard HDDs?

Yes.

Dutch Guy · 2 Mar 2006 at 09:55

Only get it if you have a special need for it to be external like taking it with you to connect to another computer.

If you don't need that do not do it, USB is much slower than IDE/SATA and also a lot more CPU intensive.

If you want a external harddisk get a Firewire one, they are faster (even though the theoretical speed is lower) and they are much less CPU intensive.

Greg · 2 Mar 2006 at 09:58

Alrighty. Thanks guys

I'm a bit undecided at the moment. It would be useful to have somthing thats portable as I travel a lot.

Ok, thanks, we'll have to see

Mujja · 2 Mar 2006 at 10:13

A 3.5" external drive isn't very portable, you also have to carry around the power lead.

If you want portable get a 2.5" drive and get a slim case for it. You'll only need to carry a USB2 cable with it.

My phone and mp3 player also have mini usb connections so I keep a cable at work, in the car and several at home and only need to take the drive with me.

I also have 2 x 300GB ext 3.5" drives now, although not as portable are still useful for storing all the crap you can collect.

I used to back everything up onto DVDs. Then I'd lose the DVD, always worry about scratching it or after a few months my optical drive wouldn't read the DVD anymore. If you add up 300GB in DVD-R costs including all the rewrites when a file changes, labelling, organising and storage space an external HDD works out better and cheaper.