WD Raptor drives in external USB2 housing useful?
 

As i'm very fond of my laptop, but bothered with the extremely slow & expensive laptopdrives of today, i'm considering buying an external housing with a raptor 10k drive in it.

The drives are very fast, but won't the usb2 interface be a very limitting factor? It would be a shame to buy such a drive if usb adds 5 millisec to the 5.2ms access time.

Access time is important, not throughput. It wouldn't be used for storage but compiling / editing / copying thousands of very little files.

How are you going to connect a sata drive to an usb-port ?
... can't find the housing you want to use

USB2 has worse access times than Firewire, which has A LOT worse access times than PATA/SATA
the 10k drive is known for having extremely good ACCESS times

so in short: it's a waste of money, get a very large slower drive (even 5200rpm is good:)) and you are good to go!

http://www.madshrimps.be/?action=getarticle&articID=173


are you kidding? http://www.eynstein.nl/Artikel.php?ID=4514

How is he going to connect that housing to an usb-port ?

Mad-soldering-skillz ? ;)

seriously.. it exists.. http://comtechnology.be/shop/product...ucts_id=902222

that product has been on the market ever since the introduction of SATA:)

aha ! nice !
Bummer the laptop hasn't got a sata-port

*sigh*

http://comtechnology.be/shop/product...ucts_id=902207

hehe, my answer should have been more elaborate

case if
laptop_connectors like 'usb2'
then performance = 'low'
print "Bummer the laptop hasn't got a sata-port"
if
laptop_connectors like 'sata'
then performance = 'very good'
print "miep miep"
end if

tadaaaaa

yes, most confusing:)

there are a few laptops out there with SATA, but they are high end and quite pricy

edit: PCMCIA is nice solution,