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Which is faster? USB 2.0 or IDE?

I

iamtrout

Diamond Member
Ok, so I need a new hard drive because my current two IDE's are full. I don't have any more room for another IDE hard drive, so that pretty much means I'm going to have to go for SATA, or does it? I can't find any good deals on SATA drives right now (at least $0.50 per GB) and I kinda need a drive quickly. Would it be smart to just get a hot deal IDE drive and hook it up to my USB 2.0 external enclosure? Would performance die?

I know USB 2.0 is 480MB/s and SATA is only 150MB/s, so wouldn't this mean that I should see NO difference in performance between USB 2.0 and SATA?
 
USB2.0 is 480Mbit/s (~60Mbyte/s) while SATA is 150 Mbyte/s, and generally the USB drives are a bit slower, but for storing large data it's just fine. I have a 250Gb 5400rpm harddrive on firewire and while it's not as fast as my IDE drives, it doesn't matter that much as I use it for movies, mp3 and backup of programs.
 
There is no comparison between the two, SAT is much faster, also not sure about your numbers but I think it is more like SATA runs at 1.5 Gb/s, compared to 480 Mb/s for USB and FireWire.
 
Ahhhhh... I never noticed the Mbit/s. Damn marketing. Any chance this would slow down movie play? I'm thinking it might with DV files...
 
But there's also the factor of how fast the hard drive can stream out data. My IDE drives currently do 47MB/s (8MB cache) and 40MB/s (2MB cache). Shouldn't 60MB/s for USB 2.0 be more than enough to handle an 8MB cache IDE drive then, considering that they can't even reach 60MB/s in the first place, much less 150MB/s?
 
The IDE channel can access the hard drive quicker than USB 2.0 even though the transfer rates are lower.

Transfer rates have little to do with the performance of a hard drive. It just coincidental that some SATA drives are faster then PATA's.
 
It really depends on what you're going to use it for. If it's for watching movies etc. it will be fine, if you need to run heavy applications from it, it will be slower.
 
Most SATA and PATA drives top out at ~40MB/s, so by themselves they work just fine in USB2 port. I have an external enclosure w. 200GB Maxtor DM9+ (8Mb cache) and I can watch movies just fine.
I also run Linux off it without any probs.
 
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