[geeks] external USB hard drive cases

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 @ 23:40 -0500, Bill Bradford said:

> On Tue, Jun 06, 2006 at 12:10:30AM -0400, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> > I can't afford SCSI, so I'm leaning toward a decent SATA drive, like a
> > Seagate Barracuda.  
> > I'm also leaning toward USB 2.0 interface, mainly because it is common.
> > I thought about eSATA, but don't know much about it, and there aren't a
> > lot of enclosures to choose from.
> > Anyone have any recommendations?  Preferrably, something you've used
> > yourself.
> 
> If you're going to hang it off USB2.0, don't bother with SATA, unless you
> *really* want to - the performance bottleneck will be the interface, not
> the drive, 

It's not a performance issue, but rather drive availability.

I was thinking about the the future since SATA is rapidly gaining market
share.

> and you won't get more than 10-12 megabytes/sec transfer rate
> regardless of what drive you use.

USB basically sucks, but it is everywhere.

However, my little 3G iPod does 15MB/sec. You sure you don't have USB
problems?

I've seen more than one USB external run at 20-30MB/sec, so it seems
like you are at the low end at 10-12MB/sec.  It is hard to find reviews
where they bothered to test the units thoroughly.

You'll never see a whole lot of speed because USB puts the mass storage
load on the main CPU and has design issues that limit what it can do.

The main reason I was looking at USB is just because nearly every
machine has it, while Firewire is rare(er).  Maybe it isn't that big a
deal, have to think about it.

Anyway, speed is not a huge issue, but I would like to do better than
10MB/sec for sure.  

> I've got a bunch of these "bare kit" USB2-to-IDE kits in service and have 
> yet to have a problem with any of them, or find a drive that they didn't
> work with:
> 
> http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=USB2IDE-N&cpc=SCH&srm=0

Neat.  I wonder though, by the time I buy a case, I might be better off
getting a full unit.


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny." --
Unknown]