USB Hard drives - how fast?

[Playitagainsam]

Hi,

I have the possibility to get a secondary hard drive, and I found two pieces of hardware at the same price (roughly) - the IBM Deskstar 7200 45GB and the LaCie 20GB USB.

The idea of having an external hard drive is appealing - especially since I have two computers, and I can use it on both. I also need to get a promise 100 (or should I stay with 66?) card, to add the IBM in my Shopss system.

Still, it's a difference of 25 gig... and the IBM is faster... the LaCie has 5400 rpm, and funneling it through the port...

So, has anyone used USB hard drives? Is the transfer speed good? Any inconveniences? Can you play, for instance, games off it, or record/play audio and video? (I'm sure you can use it for normal file storage, so I'm interested in intense data transfer).

Your comments, as always, will be appreciated.

 

[Gunbuster]

It cant be faster then 11 mega bit. Factor in transfer overhead and thats pretty darn slow for a HDD.

 

[Zenmervolt]

Data transfer for USB is a theoretical max of 12 megabits per second, which is a little over 1.3 MB/s. Bear in mind that is theoretical transfer, for example, a USB ZIP 250 is rated at "0.9 MB/s" (and actually performs around 0.5 MB/s) while an internal ZIP 250 is rated around 2 MB/s transfer, so USB will slow it down a lot. I have noticed a large improvement in my ZIP 250 USB when I have it in my Laptop on the PCMCIA adaptor (which makes it a 16 bit ATAPI drive) rather than on the USB cable with my desktop at home. For external HDD, I'd say you'd need an IEEE 1394 (or "firewire" in mac-speak) drive. My guess is that a USB HDD would be about as fast as accessing the HDD on another computer through a 10/T network with 100% of the bandwidth available.

Zenmervolt

 

[Redwingsguy]

Its gonna be a pain! Go firewire!

 

[Noriaki]

Zenmervolt's right, except that it's actually just under 1.3MB/s not over.
USB is 12megabits/sec or 1.25megabyte/s

Compare that to the ~37megabytes/s offered by an IBM 75GXP on it's outer tracks and you see there is quite a performance difference.
Also 7200rpm vs 5400rpm is going to hurt seek times, and I'm sure it doesn't have nearly as high of a track seek time.

Overall the USB drive probably sucks

 

[divinemartyr]

If you're only using it as an mp3 drive or something similar, this would be a fine alternative. I wouldn't load any programs on it however. The new USB 2.0 is going to havea max of 480mbit/s or 60 megabytes/sec, which is faster than any drive can currently attain, even ATA100 drives. If you can wait until USB2.0 drives come out, then get one of these. You will also need a motherboard or external USB 2.0 card which supports it as well.

divinemartyr

 

[1greatguy]

that 1.25 megabyte/second is a theoretical max, it probably won't sustain that for long periods so 0.5 megabyte/second average sound about right

 

[Playitagainsam]

Thanks, I'll take the "known" path and get the IBM... I have image editing, sound and the like to do on the computer, and I don't want to wait like I do with the external Zip on a parallel cable...

Cheers!

 

[usbnuts]

Well, I haven't seen any USB storage devices that are faster than 850KB/s. If you go with FireWire and you don't have a FW port, you need to shell out for another $100 for a FireWIre PCI Card. In this case, buying a USB HD will save you some $$$ in exchange for some serious speed. Of course, speed is not what you are buying.

Playitagainsam, the smart thing to do is getting a USB hard drive with an interchangeable interface. So, you are not stuck with USB 1.1 when FireWire 2.0 or USB 2.0 interface comes out.

To answer your questions...

So, has anyone used USB hard drives?
- Yes for one year.

Is the transfer speed good?
- Depends. FOr MP3 encoding, yes. For games, NO!!! FOr multimedia apps, NO!!! FOr storing huge files, YES.

Any inconveniences?
- I love mine. It's a best thing next to my dog.