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120 gb is the Largest hard drive I can put in my 4550?



 
 
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  #61  
Old December 10th 03, 01:31 PM
S.Lewis
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Very nice. So tell me, since I have neither toy yet (or the need for
either), which external drive do you believe to be faster moving/accessing
those large files? An anecdoctal answer is fine. I'm just curious.


Stew





  #62  
Old December 10th 03, 06:07 PM
Ray Setzer
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An external drive is fast enough to capture video to, but I find them to be
a real dog if I want to transfer that 20GB video file I'm working on to a
different drive.

I don't know that I could recommend a raid setup for the average user. Yes,
its fast, its reliable, but if you have a conflict of any kind, it will be
beyond the abilty of a basic user to do troubleshooting.

If I were truly going to do RAID, I would do an external RAID, but then I
don't have $2000 just lying about.

"S.Lewis" wrote in message
.. .
Very nice. So tell me, since I have neither toy yet (or the need for
either), which external drive do you believe to be faster moving/accessing
those large files? An anecdoctal answer is fine. I'm just curious.


Stew







  #63  
Old December 11th 03, 12:41 AM
Tom Scales
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My Maxtor external does both and I've tried it both ways. I haven't
benchmarked it, but to the user, the difference is not measurable.

Tom
"S.Lewis" wrote in message
.. .
Very nice. So tell me, since I have neither toy yet (or the need for
either), which external drive do you believe to be faster moving/accessing
those large files? An anecdoctal answer is fine. I'm just curious.


Stew







  #64  
Old December 11th 03, 06:06 AM
Nick
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On Wed, 10 Dec 2003 06:31:46 -0600, in alt.sys.pc-clone.dell, "S.Lewis"
wrote:

Very nice. So tell me, since I have neither toy yet (or the need for
either), which external drive do you believe to be faster moving/accessing
those large files? An anecdoctal answer is fine. I'm just curious.


I bought a couple of Maxtor USB2 external drives not too long ago for
backups.

I don't remember the exact numbers any more, but when I researched I think
the USB2 bus speed was a little faster than the Firewire speed.

Also, (if I remember right) the USB2 speed was in between the UDMA-5 bus
speed (the internal drive that came with this Dell) and the UDMA-2 bus speed
(the internal drive I moved over from my previous Micron computer).

As far as an 'anecdotal answer': backing up to the external drives is
incredibly faster than backing up to my Seagate Travan tape drive was!
Defragmenting the external drives takes longer than defragging the internal
drives, but that's probably because of the extremely large files sizes: from
~400 Megs up to ~26 Gigs.

--
Nick
  #65  
Old December 11th 03, 01:42 PM
S.Lewis
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"Nick" wrote in message
...

On Wed, 10 Dec 2003 06:31:46 -0600, in alt.sys.pc-clone.dell, "S.Lewis"
wrote:

Very nice. So tell me, since I have neither toy yet (or the need for
either), which external drive do you believe to be faster

moving/accessing
those large files? An anecdoctal answer is fine. I'm just curious.


I bought a couple of Maxtor USB2 external drives not too long ago for
backups.

snip

Tom/Nick -

That's helpful information to have. Given the USB or 1394 connection, any
problems partitioning the drive(s) during initial setup? I can see where
formatting would be simple, but I was trying to imagine the smoothest way to
fdisk such a drive.


Stew


  #66  
Old December 11th 03, 02:51 PM
Nick
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On Thu, 11 Dec 2003 06:42:04 -0600, in alt.sys.pc-clone.dell, "S.Lewis"
wrote:

That's helpful information to have. Given the USB or 1394 connection, any
problems partitioning the drive(s) during initial setup? I can see where
formatting would be simple, but I was trying to imagine the smoothest way to
fdisk such a drive.


I used Partition Magic to partition and format (NTFS) the drives; no
problems.

Frankly, no issues with the drives except that they're not accessible until
the drivers are loaded. Which means that I can't run Check Disk during boot
up and Diskeeper can't do a boot time defrag. And for my uses, that's not a
real problem. Since I just use the drives for doing backups, there's no
need to reboot to do error checks and they don't need the tiny bit of extra
optimizing that a boot time defrag would give.

--
Nick
 




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