External Hard Drive recommendations?

I have one of those Sumvision cases as well. eSATA works around twice as fast as USB. An eSATA socket can be added to a PC with SATA connections inside (though it might not be plug-and-play), or to a laptop via a plug-in card.

If you're just going to have a USB connection, though, there is no advantage in having a fast disk drive because the USB speed will be the limiting factor. Then any bog standard modern disk from a good make will be fine and no slower than anything else.

Agreed! I actually find it's more than twice as fast as USB 2.0. I use my e-sataII external drives via a 2 port SATAII plug-in card to my new ACER laptop (it was several times quicker than my older Pentium 4 desktop with the two 200GB sataI drives!) I use it in dual screen mode with my 20" 1600 x 1200 HP LP2065 monitor, it makes a nice affordable combo.

Would this be the one you were referring to Matt LACIE ? It certainly looks very pro bit of kit, tempting me to spend a bit more I think!

but, have just noticed how do I find out if I have a esata card?
quote"As mentioned earlier, there was no surprise that the drive performed best when attached via eSATA, but for a single drive device like this, the performance difference may not be worth the effort and expense of buying and installing a third-party eSATA card. "

I use a Western Digital 1TB My Book External Drive. I has wee light on the front otherwise you would't know its on very quiet and USB2 fast, so far so good. regards Ron

One of these is handy for cloning drives etc. you can swap drives over in seconds link I bought a similar one for £10 at a computer fair. I'm shortly going to use it to transfer my system over to a new hard drive.

shim

You can look at the back of your computer to se if you've the connection, that's the easiest way. they look like this link

This drive also comes with esata but it it lacks the Firewire 800 but it still does have the 400 and usb2 link
You can also save just a bit more and get this one link

this is an artical of 1,5 years ago of the previous models but you get an idea on how they preform link

Reviews of the new drives;
Lacie d2 Quadra
Western Digital My Book Home Edition (studio edition is almost the same except the firewire 800 so far as i can find out)

edit
Extra tip, convert the hard disk to NFTS if you use Windows that way it's easier to recover any data when something goes wronf or accidently delete something

btw why are there 3 topics running over external harddisk now?

Also just bought a Seagate Freeagent 500GB, excellent so far..very quiet/auto power off...setup was very easy & the Seagate Sync software is great for backup

When I bought mine Ebuyer was the cheapest

simon

Thank u so much Stefan, you are a star! BTW no eSATA on my PC !

My fault one of 3 posts on EHD mine as it was just meant to be cooling ? then develped into more, sorry... perhaps someone can transfer them together?

Lilly

An eSATA socket can easily & cheaply be added to the back of a PC with a spare SATA connection inside. (Most modern PCs use SATA). But it won't necessarily be "plug and play", meaning you might have to reboot your PC and change a BIOS setting to use eSATA - not something worth doing regularly.

The speed advantage is only a big deal anyway when you have a huge amount to backup in one go. Otherwise USB is fine.

Thank you Lilly, glad it was helpfull and no worries about the 3 topics running

You also posted also in the other topic but will combine them into one here.

The WD studio is formatted for MAC but you can easly chance that so that it works on Windows so no worries there. You simply need to Format the disk to another kind of sytem file. MAC use HFS+ and Microsft use NTFS

Now about the connections, there is a nice table here link
if you have normall firewire, USB2 would be faster but like Shim said you can buy PCI cards with eSATA that you can connect to your motheroard.
eSATA card you can also save money like Pete said and get the cable I showed you link but that won't be Plug & play like he said

To give you some times, your backup of 75GB (76 800MB) will take theoratically;
USB2 = 21 minutes
Firewire 400 = 26 minutes
Firewrie 800 = 13 mintues
eSATA = 4.5 minutes
Like I said these are theoratical numbers, so it will take some longer in the real world.

Yes eSATA is slower in the real world than the above figures suggest because your hard drive can't go as fast as eSATA can. Unlike with USB, with eSATA or SATA, you're limited by the speed of your drive. (With USB, youre limited by USB speed as it's slower than a typical hard drive).

I have Firewire too (not sure if 400 or 800). On my computer it only runs slightly faster than USB, but it is more robust (less likely to crash or be affected by other things).

Here are some numbers of the Terabite external drivers link
The firewire 800 just limits the drives so if you've firewire 800 just stick with that since there isn't much reason to get an eSATA card for it.
If you don't have a firewire 800 then get an eSATA card since it's just a bit more expensive then a firewire 800 card.
firewire 800 card £37.50
eSATA card £40.07

Beware of self bricking Seagate 7200.11 drives see this article in The Inquirer.

shim

I need to get an external hard drive and I'm considering making one as above. But what is a good cheap/free software for auto backing everything up. Most external drives come with software included.

Have a look at SyncToy just needs a few clicks after setting up. It is free though SyncToy

John