What storage solution?

leaskovski

leaskovski

leaskovski

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Hi people,

Well basically I am getting rid of my desktop as I hardly ever play any games on it anymore, and I find myself using my work laptop to do all my home computing on. Now my desktop has a ton of junk on it that I want to keep and thus I need to look for a storage solution as the work laptop only has 40GB disk space.

Now should I be looking at a NAS drive or a USB drive? Im thinking I should really get a USB drive as they are more portable (like the laptop), plus maybe I should go for one of the ones that run off of the USB power. The only downside for this though is access speed. If I go for a USB portable drive (500GB one) will I see a performance hit than if I went for a drive with a power brick?

Plus, I really want to be able to run programs off of the disk as well (for example some of the older games that I have, or some of the portable apps that you can get).

Much help in making this choice is welcome!

Cheers all
 
If it's between a budget NAS or a USB drive then get the USB drive - cheaper and a lot faster.

Not sure if you can get USB powered 500GB+ externals HDs yet
 
Firewire is a bit (20%) faster for sustained streaming than USB2, but the latter has a higher initial burst rate (480Mb/sec c.f. 400Mb/sec). You'll find Firewire faster under most conditions. Neither are good for running programs from, for that you want eSATA. You'll find games will stutter if it has to load anything from a USB or Firewire disk.
 
eSATA drives cannot draw power through the eSATA cable however, so will either need to be plugged into the wall, or will occupy one or two usb ports on the computer as well as the eSATA port. It is properly quick however.

I think the bottleneck with external hard drives tends to be the internal speed of the drive rather than the connection, so would expect USB2 and firewire to be identical. An SSD connected through USB was very quick, even when running an operating system from it.

Either way, the performance hit will be there with portable I believe. 2.5" drives tend to spin at 5400rpm, while 3.5" drives at 7200. External hard drives have standard internal hard drives inside them, the plug in ones tend to have 3.5" drives so will be quicker at some tasks and slower at none.

As a final point, the last few I've bought have all been a normal hard drive inside an external enclosure which I screw together myself.
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-006-AK&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=72
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-001-AK&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=72
are two I've used myself, and am still using.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-027-BT&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=72
was gash, mines broken after about 3 weeks. The USB socket sheared off the circuit board.

Hope at least some of the above helps :)
 
JonJ678 said:
I think the bottleneck with external hard drives tends to be the internal speed of the drive rather than the connection, so would expect USB2 and firewire to be identical. An SSD connected through :)
Click to expand...

I have not had access to an SSD to test, but the difference between USB2 and Firewire is clear if you use an enclosure (such as a WD MyBook) with dual interface. Streaming data over USB2 and Firewire using the same drive shows the difference and is how I came up with the 20%. The internal drive in the MyBook is a standard WD 3-1/2" 1TB disk and it requires an external PSU. My particular drive also features eSATA but connection is unreliable (at best). I did manage to bench it though and got 71MB/sec average read. Tomorrow I'll try benching it via USB and Firewire for comparison.
 
Good work guys. Very interesting to say the least. Maybe I should just get an external housing system and use the spare 250Gb SATA disk I have. Thats the cheapest solution as well.

Edit:

Okay I think I have narrowed it down to these two boxes...

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-008-AK
Akasa Elite eSATA/USB 2.0 3.5" Hard Drive Enclosure (AK-IC010-BK) - This allows running of off of USB power (im assuming two usb connectiosn to power it)

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-005-AK
Akasa Integral P2 eSATA/USB 2.0 3.5" Hard Drive Enclosure - Blue - This does the same as above, maybe not as big, but not sure if this is powered by a brick or via USB connections.
 
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I have just had a thought. Looking through the product descriptions on Akasa webpage there is a dick enclosure solution that has a USB and network connection option. Does anyone know of other solutions such as this? E.g one with a Network interface, a USB2 interface and a eSATA interface (that uses a 3.5 SATA disk)?

Cheers

This might be what I want as I can leave it pluded into my network most of the time, but then when I go away I can unplug and use the USB or SATA interface on the road.
 
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