Thread: External Hard Drive ???
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Old 21-11-2004, 14:34   #39
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Re: External Hard Drive ???
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike
Much difference in transfer rate between USB 2 and Firewire. Not sure whether to spend more and get one with a firewire connection !

Thanks
There's a 800mbps version of Firewire but I'm not sure how many drives support it - certainly when I was looking into this a few weeks ago none sprang out - assuming of course you have a PC that supports it too.

The transfer rate on USB2.0 is just fine for me - in fact slightly better than basic Firewire at 480Mbs. The Crossfire drive will also work on USB1.1 and I assume similar ones will, but I don't know what performance is going to be like.

XP/ME should recognise the drive without needing to instal any drivers; you'd need to d/l drivers for other OSs from the manufacturer's website if they aren't included with the HDD, but that should be pretty straightforward.

Worth bearing in mind that it probably comes out of the box formatted in FAT for maximum compatibility - but it's easy as pie to reformat to NFTS (or whatever order the letters are!)

If you're mainly going to be using it for backup then get software that does incremental backup so it doesn't have to waste time backing up files that haven't been changed.

I understand you could probably save maybe £20 getting an internal drive and one of those little caddies that turn it into an external one, but unless you're really used to delving inside PCs and setting up drive partions it seems (just my point of view though) like a lot of faffing around for little gain. The external boxes really are ridiculously easy to use.

Hope that helps
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