External Hard Drives at High RPM, Pointless?

[Devcon]

Is there a point in buying high RPM hard drives if they are going to be used externally in an enclosure? Doesn't the Firewire and/or USB 2 connection create a bottleneck that makes high speed drives pointless?

Any comments appreciated.

 

[GnomeCop]

I wouldn't say they are pointless.... but yeah, high rpms in external drives are not as important as say... storage capacity because most people use them for backup.

High rpms do make make somewhat of a difference they just feel a bit faster overall... I wouldn't use a 5400rpm ext drive if speed was a huge concern.

 

[Devcon]

Is there like a cap where it begins to make no difference? Like say, would a 7200RPM drive feel the same speed as a 10,000RPM drive when connected externally?

 

[Koing]

Originally posted by: Devcon
Is there like a cap where it begins to make no difference? Like say, would a 7200RPM drive feel the same speed as a 10,000RPM drive when connected externally?

Well considering

firewire is 400mbps ~ 50mb a sec
usb2 480mbps ~ 60mb a sec

but usb2 connection is SLOWER then a firewire connection though.

The HD will not sustain anything near to 40mb a second let alone 50mb constant so don't worry. But the bursts rate will slow down though, but shouldn't be too noticable for file transfers. I would go with a 7200rpm. Also another note is that less people have firewire in their comptuers then usb2. So got to take that in to consideration.

 

[ElFenix]

firewire is probably noticeably faster than the USB2 due to the drive interface. might have a FW2 interface, those would be really quick.

current drives can saturate 40mb/sec connection. 50, maybe even 60 on the outer tracks

 

[JackBurton]

Well Apple has Firewire800 (800Mbps=100MBps) so that should take care of that little problem.

 

[RanDum72]

Although transfer rates will be hampered somewhat by the interface speed, access times will still benefit from higher RPM drives. I have several drives in external Firewire enclosures and the 7200rpm drives are just snappier.

But if you have an external SCSI drive, then its a different story....

 

[zephyrprime]

Access times are extremely important for hard drives so I think externals will benefit from higher RPMs. STR is important but people focus on it too much. I believe that it's less important than access time.

usb2 connection is SLOWER then a firewire connection though.

Can you link any info on this? The benches I've seen show USB2 on top when used of ext hds.

 

[Devcon]

Is firewire only 40mbits p/sec or 40mBytes p/sec? And yeah, I bought an enclosure with both firewire and USB2 for my laptop along with a 7200RPM Special Edition WD HD. At only 40mbits per second though (if that's not a typo) I can't see how a higher RPM drive would provide a benefit over a 5400RPM drive. And damn, why can't PC manufacturers take a few pointers from Apple when making their hardware.

 

[RanDum72]

Can you link any info on this? The benches I've seen show USB2 on top when used of ext hds.

Almost benchies I've seen put Firewire on top. I have external eclosures with both USB 2.0 and Firewire and Firewire spanks USB 2.0.

 

[addragyn]

Is firewire only 40mbits p/sec or 40mBytes p/sec? And yeah, I bought an enclosure with both firewire and USB2 for my laptop along with a 7200RPM Special Edition WD HD. At only 40mbits per second though (if that's not a typo) I can't see how a higher RPM drive would provide a benefit over a 5400RPM drive. And damn, why can't PC manufacturers take a few pointers from Apple when making their hardware.

1394a / FireWire is 400 Mbps or 50 MBps. FireWire 800, a.k.a. 1394b, doubles that and also adds some cool new features (long cable runs, asst. media, redundant loops ).

The higher RPM drive will have lower latency. Benefit depends on your application. For storage & backup the benefit would be miniscule. A slower, cooler (and hopefully more dependable) drive is a sensible choice if you're just dropping MP3s and backups onto your external.

If you mean PC manufacturers that place a premium on quality and aesthetics over low cost see the premium builders; FalconNW, Alienware, etc. Sony trys. Or look at all the folks rolling their own. It's a different result but some of the intentions are the same.

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We got into FireWire v. USB2 in this thread. There are bunches of benches linked up in it.