External Hard drive performance

[RandomFool]

I've been using a spare 40 gig drive in my computer for file storage for awhile now. Recently my PS died and I had to switch to my laptop until the PS came in. I started considering getting an external hard drive case and putting the 40 gig in there. The thing I'm not sure about is whether I'll notice a performance decrease if I do this. I keep all my itunes music and school files on the drive and tend to use it a lot. I'm assuming It'd be slower all I want to know is if I would I notice a huge decrease in responsiveness?

-Ryan

 

[Conky]

Not sure if your laptop does USB2.0 or the older 1.0... this will be the biggest determinant to whether or not you see a difference. If you use it for storing files it shouldn't make that big of a difference either way.

 

[lobbyone]

Originally posted by: Beachboy
Not sure if your laptop does USB2.0 or the older 1.0... this will be the biggest determinant to whether or not you see a difference. If you use it for storing files it shouldn't make that big of a difference either way.

:thumbsup:

 

[RandomFool]

I've got USB 2.0 so that's not a problem. What about videos would there be a noticeable slow down accessing them from an external hard drive?

 

[imported_bum]

Originally posted by: RandomFool
I've got USB 2.0 so that's not a problem. What about videos would there be a noticeable slow down accessing them from an external hard drive?

I store plenty of video files on my external HD and the speed decrease is fairly insignificant.

 

[AstroGuardian]

The USB 2.0 controller has theoretically 480MBps transfer rate. Your 40 GB hard drive has 66, 100 or 133 MBps transfer. So plugging it on USB2.0 will not change anything with the performance of your hdd.

 

[RandomFool]

Excellent. I was reading a couple of review on some cases and people were complaining about only getting 25MBps I suppose maybe they only had USB 1. Thanks for the responses!

 

[corkyg]

I archive all my digital imagery on external HDDs. The best link for large files and steady throughput (as when offloading a gig's worth of images) has been Firewire. USB 2 is OK, but Firewire holds up better.

The best external drive now is eSATA, but not too many laptops can handle that except with a PCMCIA adapter. That is much faster than either USB 2 or Firewire.

And, I might add, the difference in speed between an internal PATA or SATA drive and any external drive is VERY noticeable.

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: RandomFool
I keep all my itunes music and school files on the drive and tend to use it a lot. I'm assuming It'd be slower all I want to know is if I would I notice a huge decrease in responsiveness?

You will only notice a difference if you do things that require a lot of back-and-forth data transfer, like running Windows or having the Firefox cache on that drive. For normal data files, an external is plenty fast. Sandra gave my drive a speed rating of 20MB/s, which is about twice the speed of a 100mb ethernet connection.
I use an external hard drive for all Bit Torrent downloads before moving them to the file server. It doesn't have any performance issues at all.

 

[corkyg]

POS asked specifically about videos - there would be a very noticeable difference in moving extensive MPEG files to and from an external drive.

Normal data, correspondence, email, etc., no noticeable diff. But - digital imagery - that's another story as I said earlier.

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: corkyg
POS asked specifically about videos - there would be a very noticeable difference in moving extensive MPEG files to and from an external drive.

I'll Sandra benchmark my hard drives to put this all into perspective. Using the Physical Disk test:

Western Digital 320GB SATA - 61MB/s
Maxtor 200GB PATA - 69MB/s
laptop 60GB SATA - 36MB/s
Maxtor 120GB PATA - 69MB/s
Western Digital 160GB USB - 18MB/s
Maxtor 250GB PATA - 69MB/s
Western Digital 200GB PATA - 69MB/s

Conclusions:
-laptop hard drives are about half the speed of desktop hard drives from Best Buy
-USB hard drives are 1/4 the speed of desktop hard drives
-SATA sucks balls compared to SCSI (Sandra identified all of the PATA drives as SCSI for some reason).

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: ShawnD1

Originally posted by: corkyg
POS asked specifically about videos - there would be a very noticeable difference in moving extensive MPEG files to and from an external drive.

I'll Sandra benchmark my hard drives to put this all into perspective. Using the Physical Disk test:

Western Digital 320GB SATA - 61MB/s
Maxtor 200GB PATA - 69MB/s
laptop 60GB SATA - 36MB/s
Maxtor 120GB PATA - 69MB/s
Western Digital 160GB USB - 18MB/s
Maxtor 250GB PATA - 69MB/s
Western Digital 200GB PATA - 69MB/s

Conclusions:
-laptop hard drives are about half the speed of desktop hard drives from Best Buy

You may have a 4200/5400RPM laptop drive. The 7200RPM ones are generally very close to the speed of 7200RPM desktop drives.

-USB hard drives are 1/4 the speed of desktop hard drives

Depends on the controller (and sometimes the enclosure if it's very cheaply/badly designed), but generally the speed difference is much smaller than what you showed.

USB2.0 usually has plenty of bandwidth for a single hard drive. The poster above is wrong, however; it's 480Mbps, which is ~60MBps, as opposed to 100/133/150/300 MBps for ATA100/ATA133/SATA150/SATA300 respectively. Little 'b' is bits, big 'B' is bytes. You should easily be able to get an STR of 50+MBps out of USB2.0.

I'll run HDTach on an external drive later and post the results compared with an internal one.

-SATA sucks balls compared to SCSI (Sandra identified all of the PATA drives as SCSI for some reason).

Again, it really depends on the controller and the exact disks. I've seen reviews of the exact same drives in PATA and SATA versions (or being put through SATA->IDE converters), and they usually perform almost identically. PATA also cuts performance in half if you are trying to access two drives on the same channel simultaneously -- not an issue with SATA.

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: Matthias99
You may have a 4200/5400RPM laptop drive. The 7200RPM ones are generally very close to the speed of 7200RPM desktop drives.

[USB/IDE] Depends on the controller (and sometimes the enclosure if it's very cheaply/badly designed), but generally the speed difference is much smaller than what you showed.

USB2.0 usually has plenty of bandwidth for a single hard drive. The poster above is wrong, however; it's 480Mbps, which is ~60MBps, as opposed to 100/133/150/300 MBps

[SATA/SCSI] Again, it really depends on the controller and the exact disks. I've seen reviews of the exact same drives in PATA and SATA versions (or being put through SATA->IDE converters), and they usually perform almost identically. PATA also cuts performance in half if you are trying to access two drives on the same channel simultaneously -- not an issue with SATA.

The laptop is probably a 4200rpm since they're built for good battery life.

Sandra says the speed difference between USB and ATA is to be expected. For their reference hard drives they have these:
Seagate, 300GB, SATA300, 8MB, 7200 = ~70MB/s
Maxtor OneTouch, 80GB, USB2, ATA133, 2MB, 7200 = ~28MB/s
Maxtor Max9, 80GB, ATA100, 2MB, 7200 = ~55MB/s

Notice how the USB drive is half the speed of a PATA drive with similar specs.

 

[SickBeast]

You can get enclosures that have E-SATA support to let you hook the drive up using SATA. It should give you the same performance as you would get internally. 🙂

 

[corkyg]

As of now, the only way I know to get eSATA linked to a laptop is via a PCMCIA Cardbus adapter. Go from there.

 

[Ruptga]

Originally posted by: AstroGuardian
The USB 2.0 controller has theoretically 480MBps transfer rate. Your 40 GB hard drive has 66, 100 or 133 MBps transfer. So plugging it on USB2.0 will not change anything with the performance of your hdd.

Unfortunately that's 480Mbps, which translates to a theoretical 60MBps.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_2.0#USB_2.0_Hi-Speed_versus_FireWire

But, it shouldn't aggravate you too much to use an external drive, especially since this is a 40GB model I doubt the bandwidth bottleneck will be too much. What I don't know about is added latency though, that might be an aggravation. I dunno though, all I know for sure is that USB 2.0's advertised speed is measured in Gpbs, not GBps, curse the marketers.

Edit: Shoot, Matthias99 beat me to it. The one time I don't read the entire thread before throwing in my 2c...

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: ShawnD1

Originally posted by: Matthias99
You may have a 4200/5400RPM laptop drive. The 7200RPM ones are generally very close to the speed of 7200RPM desktop drives.

[USB/IDE] Depends on the controller (and sometimes the enclosure if it's very cheaply/badly designed), but generally the speed difference is much smaller than what you showed.

USB2.0 usually has plenty of bandwidth for a single hard drive. The poster above is wrong, however; it's 480Mbps, which is ~60MBps, as opposed to 100/133/150/300 MBps

[SATA/SCSI] Again, it really depends on the controller and the exact disks. I've seen reviews of the exact same drives in PATA and SATA versions (or being put through SATA->IDE converters), and they usually perform almost identically. PATA also cuts performance in half if you are trying to access two drives on the same channel simultaneously -- not an issue with SATA.

The laptop is probably a 4200rpm since they're built for good battery life.

Sandra says the speed difference between USB and ATA is to be expected. For their reference hard drives they have these:
Seagate, 300GB, SATA300, 8MB, 7200 = ~70MB/s
Maxtor OneTouch, 80GB, USB2, ATA133, 2MB, 7200 = ~28MB/s
Maxtor Max9, 80GB, ATA100, 2MB, 7200 = ~55MB/s

Notice how the USB drive is half the speed of a PATA drive with similar specs.

Hmph. HDTach agrees with you -- my external drive is significantly slower, around 25MBps STR (compared to 50-60 for the internal SATA drives.) This is kind of surprising, since I thought I had seen benches where the performance difference wasn't that big. Obviously you'll be constrained a bit by the interface (since it maxes out at 60MBps), but I would expect at least 40-50 rather than 20-30. 50% loss to overhead is pretty poor.

I also tried copying some video files from my external USB2.0 HD to an internal drive. I copied right around 2,450,000,000 bytes in 115 seconds, which is right around 21MBps.

Makes me wonder if it's a problem with the onboard USB on this motherboard (RD480-based). I know some reviews had said the performance wasn't stellar.

 

[RandomFool]

Wow that's a lot of responses. Thanks for all the info guys, way more than I ever expected. I just going to skip getting a external drive i think, I'll save the money for something more worth it.

 

[lxskllr]

Originally posted by: RandomFool
Wow that's a lot of responses. Thanks for all the info guys, way more than I ever expected. I just going to skip getting a external drive i think, I'll save the money for something more worth it.

Why not get the external enclosure? They're very nice for backups, so even if it doesn't work well for day to day use, it'll still have value. The cost is pretty minimal also. You should be able to find one on sale for about $20.