external hd
 

I was thinking of getting meself an external harddisk.
Unfortunately I don't know what to get.
What would be best?
Getting a real external hd or making one myself with a harddisk enclosure thingie and an internal hd...

getting an external exclosure gives you the advantage of swapping out the HDD when you want, and upgrading the unit.

all-in-one products are more "streamlined" but the difference is almost none existant.

I had the chance to compare a Maxtor One Touch II versus a much cheaper, but same capacity drive from Medion. Performance was identical.

external enclosure and internal hd then.
Tips on the type/model of enclosure...
Tips on the hd to use

go for exclosure with Firewire support; and SATA HHD connection

HDD usage, 7200RPM 2/8Mb cache SATA

maxtor enclosures are pretty good, they have a full metal body which protects your drive a bit better then plastic. Ofcourse, if you drop your drive when it's spinning, it's dead anyway. They are also heavier (duh) and cost more.

got an icy box here, and have no complains (yet ;) )

jep, usb is fast enough

usb is fast enough, the hd is the bottleneck. Unless you have one of 10.000rpm maybe. :)
Only problem with an external hd that uses usb is that you lose an usb slot for some other external hardware thingie like a mouse or keyboard or ...

but modern computers got at least 6+ usb ports :p

Wireless keyb+mouse: -1 usb port
printer/scanner/copier: -1 usb port
HD: -1 usb port
webcam: -1 usb port
= 2 usb ports left.
... yeah you are right, more than enough but then again: The problem of samoyed was that he got no firewire and since firewire is on modern computers that means he got an old one and the old ones don't have 6+ usb ports

pci card :p

one of my previous computers (3 years ago) had no firewire, but it had 8 usb ports (4 at back, 4 on mobo)

you can also buy a PCI firewire card, but I think USB will come more handy.

USB througput is MAXIMAL 28 mb/sec. Average speeds are mostly measured ~20 megabyte/second.

A recent harddisk can easily deliver more then 40 mb/sec, average....

So it's not the hard disk that is the bottlenec, but the interface.


Firewire is interesting because it uses practicaly no CPU power, while USB does. But not every computer has fiwi and the enclosures are more expensive.
And with recent (+1 GHz) cpu's, you won't really notice the slight performance drop...Exept when you're benchmarking or so, but then again..

most firewire enclosures have USB also...

most

don't go for 10.000rpm external storage

7200rpm is enough.. in my humble opinion

Angelus is has been sniffing from his black markers; the hard drive can deliver 80-133Mb/s and more.. USB and Firewire don't come close

Actually it is glue that I have been sniffing.
Those post-it thingies smell good from time to time. ;)
I never said that 10.000rpm should be taken, me not hardware fanatic.
Me telling what someone else told me. :)
I have been told that with an ext. hd the hd itself would be the bottlenect and not the usb connection. So I figured that most hd's are 7.200rpm and if that was the bottleneck then it should be better with a 10.000rpm drive... guess I was wrong.

it's the othe way around indeed; USB2.0 is the bottle neck