External Hard Drive ???

[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

[Paulie]

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

http://www.canadiancontent.net/tech/computing/11/

Not much really by reading this, if you`re only using one usb device.

[ZrByte]

Originally Posted by ianathuth

I have my hard drives mounted in removeable caddies which means that I can take them away from the system for safe keeping and take no room up when inserted in the system. I decided on this after my grandson mucked up my PC whilst playing on it. I take my normal drive out and replace it with one setup just for him. I have an old small drive that I use just for internet banking in another caddy. This method means that you can swap boot drives very easily for different operating systems or different types of use. They can be picked up for about £4 or £5 from places such as ebuyer (#72253) and you can use whatever HD you want in them.

You can use the various USB and Firewire external drives mentioned in other posts or external caddies to take your choice of HD.

The problems with these is ofcourse going to be compatibility, they revise the designs every few months and as such a drive you bought last year wont fit in a friends caddy if he bought it a week ago.
Its ok if you buy a bulk lot and just switch the drive between your own PC's with Caddies pre-installed but what if you want to take it to assist with a repair at someones house you have never been to before?
The Removable caddy market needs a little standardisation before it becomes practical IMO.

[ZrByte]

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

Ive found USB2 to be no different to firewire, it may be worth investing in one that can do both though to ensure compatibility if you plan to move it around to a lot of different computers.

[Mike]

Originally Posted by ZrByte

Ive found USB2 to be no different to firewire, it may be worth investing in one that can do both though to ensure compatibility if you plan to move it around to a lot of different computers.

So I take it it's easy to just plug from one pc to another if necessary ?

Yes, providing, as I said before, both computers have USB 2 and/or firewire ports, and operating system support.

[Mike]

Originally Posted by JohnHorb

Yes, providing, as I said before, both computers have USB 2 and/or firewire ports, and operating system support.

Thanks....................

[paulius55]

I bought a USB2 case that holds a laptop 2.5" drive from ebay for £9, then a 2.5" laptop drive, also from ebay for £30. This gives me a usb2 powered external drive, very small, relatively fast. 2.5" drives go from about 10Gb to 80Gb. Cheap, plug and play and convenient.

[cookie_365]

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