Need advice on 2.5 HD + enclosure combo

[XLNC]

Hi All,
I work for IT in a large company. My boss has been in a good mood lately (holiday season maybe?) and has agreed to purchase 15-20 portable hard drives for back up purposes. I'm thinking it'd be cheaper/better if I bought the hard drives and enclosures separately. Normally, I would relish a chance like this to sit up all night on the web and browse for reviews, but I need quick advise on quality components before he changes his mind. Your help is appreciated.

Requirements:
Portable: 2.5" form factor. Smaller the better. Cables that aren't too long.
Fast: eSATA is a must, 65% of our machines have it. Also, does 7200 RPM vs 5400 RPM still matter for transfer speed? Back ups generally range from 5 GB - 30 GB. Files are both large and small.
Reliable: I've heard good things about WD Blacks, but we have those in our machines, and they fail constantly. 5 year warranty on HD would be terrific.
Spacious: 250GB minimum.
Inexpensive: $50-75 would be great for both drive and enclosure
Availability: Newegg has some nice deals, but many of them are limited to 3 per customer. 🙁

I'm going to be looking around when I get home, but I trust this forum's opinion a lot. Thanks again in advance.

 

[alaricljs]

Understand that you'll need to run power (usually from a USB port) to use the eSATA. Of course with USB you still have the same power limit. With that requirement you're going to want a low power drive.

The Seagate Momentus 7200.4 drives are the lowest power draw I could find. I use mine in a Macally B-S250SU which is eSATA / USB 2.0 and includes all the cables. Got the enclosure at B&H for $20.34 shipped. I went with the 320GB Seagate from newegg, but the best deal I see if you can stomach ebay is $47 each with 12 available.

 

[razel]

The Seagate Go Flex portable series might be what you're looking for. You can easily swap the adapter end between USB 2.0, 3,0, eSATA, Firewire. It's relatively new and the price *I think* for 500GB was $80 on sale at your local office store. I am unsure of the warranty length.

You can also DIY, which 2.5" bare drives usually have longer warranties, which is why they usually cost more than the ones sold in enclosures, but you could set yourself up for failures since budget DIY 2.5" enclosures contain SATA to USB adapters that are often lower grade. They may read at 33MB speed, but they often write at half that speed. Sometimes you might get lucky and it'll work for a bit but after real business world use of terabytes of data or being powered on hours and hours you'll usually end up replacing it.

For laptop 2.5" drives, stick with 5400 RPM drives especially for backups which are primarily sequential operations. In the 2.5" laptop world 7200 RPMs are mostly disappointing and won't gain you much.

 

[XLNC]

With that requirement you're going to want a low power drive.

I use mine in a Macally B-S250SU which is eSATA / USB 2.0 and includes all the cables. Got the enclosure at B&H for $20.34 shipped.

Thanks for the response. I thought all 7200 RPM drives require the same amount of power. What constitutes a low power drive?

That Macally enclosure looks good. What kind of write speeds do you get with it? The only eSATA enclosure I've tried (Acomdata) gets about 22 MB/S average w/ a 7200 RPM drive.

The Seagate Go Flex portable series might be what you're looking for. You can easily swap the adapter end between USB 2.0, 3,0, eSATA, Firewire.

That Go Flex drive looks sweet, if it works as advertised it's worth the price bump. Seems like USB cable is standard and everything else is extra. My only concern is if it can power the drive thru just the eSATA port. I know the connector is capable, but not sure about our computers.

If anyone else has any suggestions on DIY enclosures or off the shelf solutions, I'd be happy to hear it. Also, it seems 5400 vs 7200 RPM no longer matters for large sequential file transfers, is that correct?

 

[alaricljs]

eSATAp is what you need if you want power over eSATA. That means a special enclosure that supports it (few exist, I know there's a thread in here about this). Also means special cabling on the computer side or yet again a special eSATAp port.

As to "low power" I had either a Fuji or IBM that needed 1.1amps which could not be spun up via USB connection. This Seagate requires .451 amps which is perfect for normal USB 500mw.

 

[alaricljs]

Oh hey, looky apparently they have an option where you get power from USB via a "single" cable... http://www.onsale.com/p/6262865?dpno...rce=bwbfroogle

So one cable with an esatap at one and and both esata and usb at the other. Let's hope that there is enough separation between the 2 connectors to suit all your needs. I have a 3.5" startech enclosure that's worked fine for me ~1year.

As to the performance question, any particular test you'd like run on it? I don't generally do metrics on my non-server stuff.

 

[XLNC]

So one cable with an esatap at one and and both esata and usb at the other. Let's hope that there is enough separation between the 2 connectors to suit all your needs. I have a 3.5" startech enclosure that's worked fine for me ~1year.

As to the performance question, any particular test you'd like run on it? I don't generally do metrics on my non-server stuff.

If only the machines we have had eSATAp ports, my search would end with the Go Flex drives. They're exactly what I was hoping for. I might pick one up for personal use.

However, the Startech enclosure looks good. If you could see what kind of write speeds you get, that would be really helpful. I'm not a master of HD benchmarking. My only experience with eSATA has been at around 22 MB/s. If this comes close, we might have a winner. Thanks again.

 

[razel]

I think you'll want to stick with eSATA for backups. It's not a total loss if your machines don't have eSATA/USB combo port. SATA to eSATA with a separate plug for USB power all on one cable do exist on ebay (search for 'eSATA-USB combo port cable'). The better one's I've seen come with a silicone drive sleeve and the SATA end is open. That's where you plug the adapter. It's like a super DIY version of GoFlex, but keep in mind it is DIY and in the business world, if it all goes bad, it's your bad. 🙂

 

[XLNC]

It's like a super DIY version of GoFlex, but keep in mind it is DIY and in the business world, if it all goes bad, it's your bad.

Yeah, very true. I'm not too concerned with data loss, since these will be for temporary back ups. At this time, I decided the eSATA for data + USB for power cable is what I need from an enclosure. That Startech one looks good, provided transfer rates are decent. I'll see if alaricljs can post some numbers.

 

[biostud]

I have th seagate momentus 7200.4 + e-sata/usb2.0 enclosure. It needs either e-sata+1 usb power or two usb ports to ensure power, but sometimes it can work with only one usb port.

 

[alexruiz]

For laptop 2.5" drives, stick with 5400 RPM drives especially for backups which are primarily sequential operations. In the 2.5" laptop world 7200 RPMs are mostly disappointing and won't gain you much.

Agree and disagree.
The 5400 rpm is enough for backup operations, but in everyday usage as boot drive, the 7200 rpm is a very very nice improvement in speed over the 5400 rpm. The sequential speed might bench be close, but for random operations, the 7200 makes a nice difference. Heck, If you cannot afford an SSD, upgrading your laptop boot drive to 7200 rpm does make a difference.

 

[alaricljs]

So what hoops do I have to jump to be able to post attachments? sheesh...

XLNC, the difference on my Macally B-S250SU esata vs the drive directly is minimal, if I decided to do a bunch of test runs it'd probably land inside the statistical variance.

Writes start at 3.5MB/s for 512byte transfers, speed approximately doubling as the transfer size also doubles until it peaks at 98MB/s with 64k and larger transfers. Reads are much faster for the small sizes and also peak at 98MB/s

USB2 on the Macally is peaking at 30MB/sec with 64k and larger and is typically 30% of the sata speeds.


My eSata startech is less impressive than the macally, but I can't isolate the disk from that. I would have expected higher speeds from the 3.5" 7200rpm Seagate 7200.10, but it's peaking at 82MB/s.