What is a good external harddrive?

[Comdrpopnfresh]

My sister has an old dell dimension w/ a 2.4ghz P4 on s478. It has 512mb of RDRAM, and I believe it might not have usb 2.

I'm not sure how much storage capacity she is seeking. But she has indicated she is saving up for a new computer- she's leaning towards a macbook for use w/ photoshop, but I'm trying to sway her toward a desktop for better performance/price. So either way, I'd assume her current system will not be a long-term constriction.

As I understand, there are three connection/interface options : usb2.0, firewire, and esata
She'd be using the external for storage of her photos...
What are the pros/cons of each connection? I'm unsure if she'd prefer a 3.5" or 2.5" external drive.

How well do internal drives put into an enclosure work?

 

[WildW]

It's really down to what sockets you have available. They're all pretty much plug-and-play. USB and Firewire are roughly the same speed, eSATA will be faster but is less common on computers. For photos and even movies USB will be fast enough, and is probably the most widely supported. Just make sure her PC supports USB 2 first or it'll be dog slow.

External hard drives are just regular internal hard drives in their own cases. We've had a couple that were awful (made by Lacie), both died within a year. Turned out they were made from two smaller drives in a RAID configuration, so when one drive failed, everything was lost. The cooling was poor so they just cooked themselves.

I've not had that trouble with other single-drive externals. Strangely I've found recently that it's often cheaper to buy external drives than internal ones in the first place, usually due to whatever offers the shops have on at the time.

 

[Comdrpopnfresh]

although an external and an internal placed in an enclosure are essentially the same, do those enclosures present any bottleneck?

 

[WildW]

USB and slower (and I presume more common) varients of Firewire will be a bottleneck on drive performance.

Assuming USB2, USB has performance of up to 50 to 60 megabytes per second. This is something like half the speed you'd get if the drive was installed inside the PC. Old USB1.1 is really too slow to everyday harddrive use (something like 1 megabyte per second).

Firewire starts at similar speeds to USB2, but there are faster and faster varients that I don't know much about. I think the slowest flavour is the most commonly found on PCs.

USB or Firewire are plenty quick enough for most folks for data storage like photos, documents, movies, etc.

eSATA is supposed to be identical performance to SATA installed internally to a PC, so is as much as you'd ever need for home use.

An external and an internal placed in an enclosure will perform exactly the same. The controllers they use in the ready-made ones are still generic cheap ones that work with any drive. In the past I've bought cheaper external drives and pulled them apart straight away to put the drive inside my PC, and reused the controllers on occasion.