Need VERY basic info on external hardrives.

[StageLeft]

A friend is asking for advice on an external. I said that an internal will go faster but this external maxtor uses usb 2 which supposedly hits 480 mbps right? Anyway that's way more speed than he can possibly need. However, do most recent motherboards support usb 2? His mobo is currently housing a P3 733 to give an idea on age but I'm not sure of the board name.

Also if this is the case how do seek times and all of that compare to that of an IDE internal?

 

[StageLeft]

 

[RSMemphis]

480 Mbps is about 60 MB/s, plus USB overhead. I guess you can get about 40-50 MB/s burst from an external drive.

The USB overhead also increases latency, I think that seek times may be up a little bit, but not a whole lot.
Such drives would definitely benefit from a large cache.

 

[StageLeft]

Would the latency be significant enough for the average joe to notice?

 

[CQuinn]

The "average joe" would probably not notice, but your friends system is most likely only supporting USB 1.0,
which would severly limit transfers if he is planning on using it like a normal drive.

He would have to upgrade the motherboard, or get a USB 2.0 PCI card to get true performance out of the external.

 

[StageLeft]

<< The "average joe" would probably not notice, but your friends system is most likely only supporting USB 1.0,
which would severly limit transfers if he is planning on using it like a normal drive.

He would have to upgrade the motherboard, or get a USB 2.0 PCI card to get true performance out of the external. >>

Thanks - when did mobos start supporting USB2 across the board, so to speak?

 

[Mavrick007]

Most recent mobos do not support USB 2.0 except the very new chipsets that are just coming out now. Even though this is a USB drive, it is still ide going through USB so it will not be any faster than normal ide drives. If it was solid state, then that might be different, but that would make it excessively expensive.

 

[Electric Amish]

<< Need VERY basic info on external hardrives. >>



They go OUTSIDE of your computer.

amish

 

[StageLeft]

OK thanks guys I think i got the info. Amish was particularly helpful!

 

[Eug]

The Oxford 911 Firewire chipset supposedly maxes out at around 35 MB/s (despite the 400 Mbps on paper), and people are saying that in real life USB 2 is either the same or slower (despite the 480 Mbps on paper). Plus USB 2 is immature and it uses more CPU. I guarantee that his mobo does NOT support USB 2 so he'd have to buy a PCI adapter anyway.

Best bet is to get a cheap Firewire PCI adapter, an IDE drive, and an external Firewire 3.5" hard drive enclosure (about $100) with the Oxford 911 chipset. I'm using such a set up with my Celeron 533A@880 on BX, under Win XP. I'm getting real world write speeds with an IBM 75GXP of around 20 MB/s, but I dunno what my reads speeds are exactly. People say they've gotten well over 30 MB/s with benchmarks.

 

[StageLeft]

BTW his mobo is this Asus P3V4X.

Thanks EUG. I think firewire would be the better option at this time - I'll let him know. I am thinking perhaps of recommending an audigy if he goes with a firewire setup so that he can get a soundcard upgrade and use the audigy's on board firewire also. What do you think?