Anyone Use Portable External Harddrives? I Need Advice

[werk]

Two votes for Western Digital from people I trust is a good sign.

I've been thinking about buying a Terabyte external harddrive. Mmmm, terabyte...

For you:

Remember when one gigabyte was HUGE?

 

[Angel Tarragon]

So how long will it be until we see petabyte hard drives?

 

[Thanee]

I think WD also has one with Firewire 800. That seems like a good idea (if one can get a controller for it; actually not sure how well supported the standard is) with such a huge external drive.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Rackhir]

An eSata connection is also a good option. Even Firewire 800 restricts the throughput to some degree. eSata should give you the same speed as if it were an internal drive (of course as with anything a sufficiently kluged together case might hobble that).

Though the through put is also less likely to be an issue with one of the 2.5" HDs since they are inherently slower and also generally have slower rotational speeds.

FWIW, USB/USB2 require processor attention where as Firewire does not (I believe that eSata shouldn't as well, but I'm not 100% sure). Which is why Firewire tends to have better throughput (especially if you are doing processor intensive work like video at the same time) even though USB2 is supposed to be somewhat faster.

 

[XCorvis]

$10 is a lot more?

I and others I know have run into problem because we do a lot of music production and generally the USB bus gets all clogged up. It's a problem, and I just wanted to voice it in case it's a problem that the OP might run into as well. Sounds like you've never had this specific problem...or you didn't notice if you did.

Seriously though, ten bucks more is cost prohibitive? On a $200 device...oh man!

After azhrei_fje mentioned he hadn't seen a price difference, I went and looked again. With external drive enclosures, I see a difference of almost nothing for the minor brands. If I was buying enclosures, I'd do that. But, when I go check the prices on similar models of LaCie and Simpletech drives, I see a much higher markup. It used to be more, I think, so it may be time to reevaluate what I recommend to my users.

But yes, if you do need that extra performance, it's not a huge price to pay.

 

[azhrei_fje]

And the performance difference can be significant. It's at least worth looking into...

 

[Raevynn]

Do you use them with your laptop?

Yep. the 250 even went to antarctica and held my Aperture backups and my iTunes library. So I am please. That said, I have a 1TB Drive on my desk that I back everything up to on the return trips home... so... also I do wish it was FireWire, but the USB seems ok. I only notice it when I use parallels or vmware.

EDIT: I also use Mac, so this is mostly on a Mac Book Pro, and the drive is HFS Journaled. (OSX Only unless you use MacDrive {which I do and carry on a USB stick})

Hope that helps...

 

[werk]

Also, if you are a bit price conscious, assemble it yourself. Buy the enclosure you want and a drive you want and put it all together. Buying them pre-assembled really seems to jack up the price.

I'm actually more excited for solid state drives than hugenormous drives...I don't have a lot of big files that I need fast access to. SSD is the future...err...the present.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

I'm actually more excited for solid state drives than hugenormous drives...I don't have a lot of big files that I need fast access to. SSD is the future...err...the present.

Lucky you, I just did a backup of my primary machine. WinRAR under the best compression routine, 93gb. For perspective that 93gb is not an image just a personal file dump, it's only 6gb music, 1.3gb videos. My D&D folder alone is over 17gb. On one machine, I for one desperately want the manufacturers to make good progress on their spintronics research.

By the way anyone know an archiver with better compression than WinRAR?

 

[azhrei_fje]

What's the average compression ratio on WinRAR? I get very good rates with bzip2 (but mostly compressing programs: a mix of source code and compiled/executable files) and I understand 7-Zip is supposed to be good for certain file types...