What's faster: Internal or External HD?

[JASANITY]

I was wondering which one is faster? Are PATA/SATA internal HD's faster than external USB or firewire? OR are external USB or firewire faster than PATA/SATA internal HD's?

Thanks,
Jason

 

[ta8689]

Internal is gunna be faster there dude. Why would they connect to the sata port when you could hook it up to a USB header on ur mobo if it were faster...duh

 

[JASANITY]

I've heard real world use, people say it seems the same.

 

[ta8689]

I say inernal. externals nice when your building a few pcs and you have lots to install and its all on that hdd

 

[Pariah]

External drives are just internal drives put into an external case. If the interface is the same, the performance will be the same. Since this is rarely the case, as most external drives use either USB2 or Firewire 400, external will be slower since the interface is slower standard PATA/SATA.

 

[elkinm]

Internal drives are faster, but not by all that much because hard drives are not that much faster.

Benchmarks show that Firewire 400 is faster then USB 2 even though USB 2 has slightly higher bandwidth. Firewire 800 is even faster and should be very close to internal.

And SATA and ATA100/133 are even faster plus they have dedicated optimized controllers so they are and should always be faster.

 

[ta8689]

I have an asus A8n-sli premium. It has the coolest thing.. sata ports (and a power port) that yo can put in a pci slot in your case. You just run the cables to the mobo and boom... external sata-150. I havent used it, but its pretty neat. Go asus..

 

[OSX]

You could do that on any mobo. Just take out a slot cover, stick a SATA cable out of it and get a power cable extension. Hell, you could do it with SCSI too.

 

[Bobthelost]

If your real world use is to play MP3s then there isn't much difference, but if it's photoshopping massive files then there is no contest.

Of course with eSATA ports there is no difference, but they're mostly a gimmic at the moment.

 

[stardrek]

Internal is always faster unless you are talking external SATA, exculding SCSI of course.

 

[Susquehannock]

Originally posted by: Pariah
External drives are just internal drives put into an external case. If the interface is the same, the performance will be the same. Since this is rarely the case, as most external drives use either USB2 or Firewire 400, external will be slower since the interface is slower standard PATA/SATA.

That's exactly it. Most externals use internal drives.

PATA & SATA > USB2 & Firewire

 

[narutofan36]

internals are much faster


btw, when choosing a external hd, go to firewall connection, when you look at the stats between firewall and usb, you can see usb transfers data at a faster rate but at such fast speeds, files get "clumped together" making it slow down

 

[Susquehannock]

Originally posted by: narutofan36
internals are much faster>>>>>>>>

Again, it depends on the interface. You could buy an external case, put an internal drive in it, and use SATA.
In that instance it would perform exactly the same as it would if it was installed internally.

I know because that is exactly what I did.

 

[Pariah]

Firewire 800 will run just as fast as an internal as well, so the blanket statement that internals are much faster isn't really accurate.

Also, naruto, is firewire, not firewall. The clumped together comment makes not sense either.

 

[JASANITY]

ok thanks for all the replies

 

[Jiggz]

Originally posted by: Susquehannock

Originally posted by: narutofan36
internals are much faster>>>>>>>>

Again, it depends on the interface. You could buy an external case, put an internal drive in it, and use SATA.
In that instance it would perform exactly the same as it would if it was installed internally.

I know because that is exactly what I did.

Review the original example mentioned by the original posts. And yes, the answer is internal HDD are faster since he is comparing SATA/EIDE/PATA with USB/FW. The original post was crystal clear I dunno why we have to make it complicated.

And for NarutoFan, it's not a "firewall" but firewire! A firewall is for buildings, houses, cars, etc . . . but never for a computer.

 

[bob4432]

scsi FTW!!!!

 

[Fingolfin269]

I'm wondering about this too. When you guys say 'much faster' what do you mean by that? It's a pretty subjective statement. I'm currently running one 80gb WD 8mb and am tired of deleting junk off and decided I would get another internal HD. Then I noticed external prices aren't really that bad and I thought maybe I could just use the external as overflow storage so that it would then be portable. I can't think of any reason I would ever need near 80gb if I kept all of my music and such on an external.

If I am mainly going to use the external as a drive to copy to from my internal hd then just how much of a speed difference are we talking about? Something will take 11 minutes instead of 10?

 

[corkyg]

Too many generalizations always lead to the exceptions. I have a SATA drive in an external case connected to the SATA port on the mobo. Why would it perform any differently inside the case than outside?