My first external hard drive purchase

D

Darth Garth

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I have 3 drives in my machine full of stuff which I rather neglect to backup on a regular basis as writing 400GB onto DVD's is rather a pain in the butt.

I looked at buying a cheap NexGen external enclosure and a big drive but it looked rather tacky and I had doubts over it's longevity and the suitability of the USB interface for heavy file copying.

Thought about setting up a NAS using an old PC running a NAS orientated Linux distro but it meant another box in my study generating more heat and which I have to administer with cables and wires over the place.

I went to Makro for some last minute Christmas shopping and saw that they had a 500GB Seagate external hard drive (Barracuda with 16MB cache) on sale.

The unit looked very nice and rugged and it supported Firewire in addition to USB.

I am running it currently from my SoundBlaster Audigy Firewire port with Microsoft's free filebackup utility Synctoy to keep my internal drives in sync.

http://www.seagate.com/products/retail/external/usbfirewire
 
Got the same drive for my lounge - nice and quiet but has a nasty habit of wanting to sleep all the time. A cron job seems to have stopped that from happening for the most part. Firewire is so much nicer, at least on a Mac.

Considering getting another soon. :D
 
That's why I'm not too concerned with adding another one :)

I also have a feeling they should stack quite nicely - they sure do radiate a fair amount of heat though. :eek:
 
Firewire all the way!! Constant 400MB/s.

I believe the new Macs are using Firewire2, which gives 800MB/s? Very nice.
 
kingrob said:
Firewire all the way!! Constant 400MB/s.

I believe the new Macs are using Firewire2, which gives 800MB/s? Very nice.
Click to expand...
Some of the older ones came with fw800 too :D

Unfortunately my newish mini didn't so I'll have to make do with the fw400 :o

I hope Makro still has stock.
 
Claymore said:
Is it really? I have no problems at all with external drives on USB2.
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Have you tried FW? It really is much better especially for sustained reading/writing.
 
bwana said:
Have you tried FW? It really is much better especially for sustained reading/writing.
Click to expand...

Firewire will give you a constant 400MB/s transfer rate, USB2 transfer rates 'flactuate'.

Check out this article : http://www.usb-ware.com/firewire-vs-usb.htm

Read and write tests to the same IDE hard drive connected using FireWire and then Hi-Speed USB 2.0 show:

Read Test:
5000 files (300 MB total) FireWire was 33% faster than USB 2.0
160 files (650MB total) FireWire was 70% faster than USB 2.0

Write Test:
5000 files (300 MB total) FireWire was 16% faster than USB 2.0
160 files (650MB total) FireWire was 48% faster than USB 2.0
Click to expand...

So, if you have an external hard drive for backups, connect it via Firewire - it will speed up your backups a lot. :)
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Thanks tibby for the tip about Synctoy - great plan!

PS Great price you got I think!
 
kingrob said:
Firewire will give you a constant 400MB/s transfer rate, USB2 transfer rates 'flactuate'.
Click to expand...

Interesting, thanks.

My drive is USB2 only, but I don't have any speed quibbles. That may be because I use Robocopy, and update only newer/changed files, so not much in the way of sustained streaming.
 
Went to Makro, credit card in hand, they only had the USB2-300gb drives in stock so I left empty handed. :o
 
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