Newbie question - recommendation for external hard drive connection method

A newcomer's question that I'm sure is answered elsewhere but.. I need
to buy an external hard drive (approx 160Gb or more) and to me there
seem to be three primary methods of connecting the thing up - USB 2.0,
Firewire or network (via Ethernet card). Are there any strong opinions
on which is the best (primarily in terms of speed and value for money)
? Of course if a drive can be accessed by multiple methods that's
great, but I don't want to pay extra for something unnecessary. Also,
any specific recommendations for particular manufacturers would be be
very useful..

Thanks in advance

On 13 May 2005 07:25:10 -0700, "benjrees" wrote:

A newcomer's question that I'm sure is answered elsewhere but.. I need
to buy an external hard drive (approx 160Gb or more) and to me there
seem to be three primary methods of connecting the thing up - USB 2.0,
Firewire or network (via Ethernet card). Are there any strong opinions
on which is the best (primarily in terms of speed and value for money)
? Of course if a drive can be accessed by multiple methods that's
great, but I don't want to pay extra for something unnecessary. Also,
any specific recommendations for particular manufacturers would be be
very useful..

We use a removeable drive bay.

http://www.directron.com/kf23.html

Be careful about putting more than one on a given IDE channel.

In article ,
Bob wrote:
On 13 May 2005 07:25:10 -0700, "benjrees" wrote:

A newcomer's question that I'm sure is answered elsewhere but.. I need
to buy an external hard drive (approx 160Gb or more) and to me there
seem to be three primary methods of connecting the thing up - USB 2.0,
Firewire or network (via Ethernet card). Are there any strong opinions
on which is the best (primarily in terms of speed and value for money)
? Of course if a drive can be accessed by multiple methods that's
great, but I don't want to pay extra for something unnecessary. Also,
any specific recommendations for particular manufacturers would be be
very useful..

We use a removeable drive bay.

http://www.directron.com/kf23.html

Be careful about putting more than one on a given IDE channel.



There are external SATA exclosures and this would be my choice.
Someone makes a PCI card that puts a SATA connector on the PC rear
panel. It's just a patter of time for someone to make a front panel
adapter.

SATA was designed for hotpluging. IDE isn't.

--
a d y k e s @ p a n i x . c o m

Don't blame me. I voted for Gore.

On 13 May 2005 10:44:54 -0400, (Al Dykes) wrote:

Don't blame me. I voted for Gore.

One political comment deserves another.

Thank God Gore lost or America would be as ****ed up as Britain is
today.

Gore was the only reason Clinton was not run out of office - no one
wanted to have him as president so they backed off Clinton.

History will show that GW Bush is one of the greatest presidents ever.
He has to make the tough decisions that Clinton didn't have the balls
to make - and that's why he has to do drastic things.

We now return you to the regularly scheduled forum on hardware.



--

Map of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy
http://home.houston.rr.com/rkba/vrwc.html

"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.
All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and
denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the
country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
--Hermann Goering

No wonder you have so many problems with computers. You are as ****ed up as
America is.

GW Bush is retarded. How many billions do you want to waste on the Great
Hydrogen Fraud? Bush is also increasing imports of Oil and Gas, further
raising prices.

"Bob" wrote in message
...
On 13 May 2005 10:44:54 -0400, (Al Dykes) wrote:

Don't blame me. I voted for Gore.

One political comment deserves another.

Thank God Gore lost or America would be as ****ed up as Britain is
today.

Gore was the only reason Clinton was not run out of office - no one
wanted to have him as president so they backed off Clinton.

History will show that GW Bush is one of the greatest presidents ever.
He has to make the tough decisions that Clinton didn't have the balls
to make - and that's why he has to do drastic things.

We now return you to the regularly scheduled forum on hardware.

On Fri, 13 May 2005 09:00:45 -0700, "Eric Gisin"
wrote:

You are as ****ed up as America is.

Ad-hom noted.

On 13 May 2005 07:25:10 -0700, "benjrees" wrote:

A newcomer's question that I'm sure is answered elsewhere but.. I need
to buy an external hard drive (approx 160Gb or more) and to me there
seem to be three primary methods of connecting the thing up - USB 2.0,
Firewire or network (via Ethernet card). Are there any strong opinions
on which is the best (primarily in terms of speed and value for money)
? Of course if a drive can be accessed by multiple methods that's
great, but I don't want to pay extra for something unnecessary. Also,
any specific recommendations for particular manufacturers would be be
very useful..

Thanks in advance

As others have veered off into politics, I'll take a stab at this.

NAS (Network Attached Storage) is the slowest of the three attachment
methods you listed. It is handy if you want multiple computers to
have access to the drive, otherwise not the best answer.

USB 2.0 has a theoretical maximum throughput of 480Mbps, while
Firewire is at 400 Mbps. Yes, there is "Firewire2" at 800 Mbps, but
you are not likely to find one of those at a reasonable price at this
point in time. Despite the theoretical advantage of USB 2.0 over
Firewire, Firewire tends to be better in practice.

Very interesting as I was assuming NAS would be fastest, based on
price.

If there's not a great deal of difference in speed between Firewire and
USB 2.0 I'll base my decision on what the best manufacturers have to
offer - are there any real stinkers to avoid ? And any sure bets for
good quality drives ?

benjrees wrote in message
oups.com...

A newcomer's question that I'm sure is answered elsewhere but..
I need to buy an external hard drive (approx 160Gb or more)
and to me there seem to be three primary methods of connecting
the thing up - USB 2.0, Firewire or network (via Ethernet card).

Correct.

Are there any strong opinions on which is the best
(primarily in terms of speed and value for money) ?

Like with most things, there isnt a clear best.

The network approach has some real advantages, mainly that
its been around for years and is very solid now, with the drive on
another PC on the network. Main downsides are that this is the
slowest, there arent very many drives with that approach interface
wise, and pretty crummy documentation on those that are around,
mainly because the hard drive majors dont use this approach much.

USB2 is the most common approach used, but it has real
downsides, mainly in that its still rather immature technology
so the life of the drives is often quite poor, just because they
arent adequately cooled so the drive gets stinking hot, and
there is a too high level of other problems, particularly with
the drive not being reliable enough data wise, nothing like
as reliable as an internal drive. And a real problem with
adequate tools that can run diagnostics on the drive and
even do stuff as basic as SMART and temperature monitoring.

Firewire has most of those problems too and has another,
quite a few of even recent PCs dont support firewire.
Quite a few drives are both firewire and USB2 tho.
Firewire is theoretically more efficient protocol wise,
but while you can see that in the benchmarks, it isnt
likely to be something that most could pick with a
proper double blind trial with no benchmark allowed.

Of course if a drive can be accessed by multiple methods that's
great, but I don't want to pay extra for something unnecessary.

Also, any specific recommendations for particular
manufacturers would be be very useful..

I havent seen any of the majors that are good
enough on the drive cooling for my taste.

"benjrees" wrote in
oups.com:

A newcomer's question that I'm sure is answered elsewhere but.. I need
to buy an external hard drive (approx 160Gb or more) and to me there
seem to be three primary methods of connecting the thing up - USB 2.0,
Firewire or network (via Ethernet card). Are there any strong opinions
on which is the best (primarily in terms of speed and value for money)
? Of course if a drive can be accessed by multiple methods that's
great, but I don't want to pay extra for something unnecessary. Also,
any specific recommendations for particular manufacturers would be be
very useful..

Thanks in advance


I bought a hard drive and enclosure separately. I chose an enclosure that
has both USB 2.0 and FireWire connections It was only about $30 online. I
bought a 120GB 7500 RPM drive for $88.

With both USB 2.0 and FireWire connections on the enclosure, I've got almost
universal connectivity. I can take the drive to almost any PC/MAC/Linux box
and hook up for data transfer. Since USB 2.0 is backward compatible with
USB, it means I can still connect and transfer to a "slow USB" computer--it
just takes more time.

I guess you'd have to consider whether you want to use it on your own
computer or if you want to be able to "take it anywhere."

SATA isn't available on lots of computers. External SATA is very rare these
days. SATA would be nice and fast. If for your home computer only, maybe
that would be best. If you plan to take the drive somewhere, might be best
to see if there's a SATA hook up available.

For speed? Let's look at speed.

USB and FireWire claim 400 Megabits per second. 400megabits ÷ 8 bits per
byte =50 MegaBytes per second.

50 Megabytes per second. Most hard drives aren't going to be able to sustain
that rate of transfer. They may "burst" faster, but, that only lasts a
portion of a second in time.

Most hard drive companies won't divulge their "sustained" rate of data
transfer. The "sustained" data transfer rate is largely dependant on platter
rotation speed and platter density. You can search the web for hardware
reviews to see what the "sustained" rate of data transfer is for some drives.

The "bigger" the drive--usually--the faster it is ... as long as they are
cramming those Gigs on the same number of platters.

In other words, if you have a 7500RPM 160 GB drive using 3 platters compared
to a 7500 RPM 300 GB drive also using 3 platters, you can see that the
magnetic material must be packed more densely onto the 3 platters of the
300GB drive.

Packed more densly means that more data "space" travels under the read/write
head at any given moment in time.

So ...

When you consider what connection you want, you may want to consider the
maximum sustained transfer rate of the hard drive that your choose.

If you choose a 7500RPM drive of 200GB or less, you probably won't see a
sustained rate of data transfer much more than 50MegaBytes per second. So,
FireWire and/or USB 2.0 would be fine. (You probably would want to dedicate
the hard drive to one particular USB or FireWire port. If you shared the
port with a printer or something, you'd be giving up some bandwidth to the
other device running on that port.)

There is double-speed FireWire. See the 800Mbps FireWire stuff at
http://www.orangemicro.com. To utilize that speed, however, you'd have to
have a double-speed FireWire PCI adapter (or chip on your MoBo) along with a
hard drive enclosure that is 800Mbps FireWire. It is backward compatible
with regular FireWire. That would give you a sustained rate of transfer
somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 MegaBytes per second. However, I doubt
that even a 350 GB drive could sustain that speed. It might, though. I
haven't clocked them. Reviewers online could answer that question.

At any rate, you see specs for ATA133 and SATA 150. These are 133
MegaBytes/second and 150 MegaBytes per second.

These rates can only be delivered from your computer to the memory chip in
the hard drive. These rates cannot be "sustained" through transfers to the
magnetic medium of the hard drive platter.

So, the ATA133 and the SATA 150 only pertain to a fraction of a second where
data can be written to the memory chips of the drive. Once that memory chip
is saturated after the first second or so, you are slowed to whatever data
transfer rate can be accomplished by the pure mechanics of the platters
spinning under the read/write head--known as the "sustained" transfer rate.

So?

USB 2.0 and plain old FireWire is usually good enough for most people. An
enclosure at one of the smaller outlets on the web will have USB 2.0 and
FireWire chips in a plastic enclosure for about $30. Often, there's free
shipping.

What brand to choose? Doesn't really matter. There's only a few companies
out there making chips. No matter what you buy, you'll probably get Oxford,
VIA, or NEC chips in the external enclosure.

//rus//