USB Harddrive recommendations.

[Alexrose1uk]

Im currently using a freecom 250GB network drive in USB mode, and needless to say the performance is very poor (2/3meg read/write max, over USB2.0), as my dad didnt do any research before he bought it.

Im currently thinking of investing in a faster one, so can anyone recommend me some new ones to look at, with these priorities in mind:

1)Throughput (USB2.0 should NOT have a throughput of 2/3meg, come on!)
2)Reliability
3)Price (Im a student so money can be sparse)
4)Storage Size

Other factors like the size of the thing dont really matter to me.

Also if anyones got any tips/tricks to get this bloody thing to go faster, I'd also like to hear!

 

[rpstewart]

How are you measuring the speed? Even a decent drive will return poor speeds if it's copying small files.

I found a big improvement in speed by converting my external drive from FAT32 to NTFS.


As for replacements then I normally recommend getting the caddy and drive separately and assembling them yourself. You can then pick and choose the features you want. For USB2 only you've basically got the pick of the stall, any of the Icybox caddies are pretty good, just make sure you know what kind of drive it's expecting (IDE or SATA). A USB connection means that drive speed isn't important because the USB is the bottleneck so you can go by price, capacity or manufacturer depending on your preference.

 

[Alexrose1uk]

Yes I did measure the speed, it was pulling 2/3 megs! It's already an NTFS drive

As you're recommending caddies, do you happen to have any experience one whether any perform better than others etc?

 

[Hxc]

IcyBox are tops tbh.