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Author Topic: 250 gig $279 USB external  (Read 2201 times)

gkerber

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250 gig $279 USB external
« on: July 29, 2003, 07:06:59 pm »

CompUSA has Maxtor 250 gig external USB/Firewire hd's for $279 this week.  It's a 5400 rpm drive, not the fastest, but I suspect 5400 or 7200 is okay for USB 2.0....

Anyway, I picked up one for my music backups, I can sleep better now....
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xen-uno

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Re: 250 gig $279 USB external
« Reply #1 on: July 29, 2003, 09:26:42 pm »

A 15K drive would be OK, too (if they existed for that interface). Only when the reads come from the on-board disk cache will the USB2 speed limit of 60 MB/s be reached...and that can (and probably does) happen on any external HD using USB2 or FireWire-400.

10-27

phelt

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Re: 250 gig $279 USB external
« Reply #2 on: July 29, 2003, 11:15:53 pm »

How long is the warranty? Also, do you mean USB2 for the interface? Whatever, I recommend using firewire over USB2 for external storage.
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gkerber

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Re: 250 gig $279 USB external
« Reply #3 on: July 30, 2003, 07:10:48 am »

Quote
How long is the warranty? Also, do you mean USB2 for the interface? Whatever, I recommend using firewire over USB2 for external storage.


I'll have to check on the warranty when I get home.

Yes I meant USB2, it will work with USB1, but very slow.

It has USB2 and Fireware, but my pc only has USB2.  I could buy a fireware card.

Why do you think one is better than the other for this application?
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xen-uno

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Re: 250 gig $279 USB external
« Reply #4 on: July 30, 2003, 07:29:11 am »

Check out the graphs & tables here. Appears to be a mid 1993 article.

edit: must have been half asleep...it is 2003

10-27

phelt

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Re: 250 gig $279 USB external
« Reply #5 on: July 30, 2003, 09:48:18 am »

I'm going to have to partially disagree with gmonkey. I 've used quite a few USB2 and firewire devices, and I notice particular differences between them. In my experience USB2 is slightly less responsive in some circumstances.
Specifically: slower in initially accessing a device or accessing a device after a long period of time. This manifests as a slower "wake-up" time to populate file/directory lists in Explorer, and slower initial response upon file transfer (read or write). USB2 also seems to "cheat" more often than firewire when I perform moderate to large file writes to the external device - on the surface it appears to have transferred files, but has often only set up a delayed write transaction. That shouldn't be a problem for most file operations, but could be problematic if a bunch of large writes start getting pushed to the device, ala batch image/audio/video processing. Firewire has to do some queuing in the same circumstances, but seems to handle it with a lower frequency of errors. Simultaneous read and write from/to external devices also appears to be better handled by firewire.

All of that is anecdotal, however. It's been my experience on about 6 different machines with different FW and USB2 chips (primarily TI, VIA and Oxford Semi) and varying devices - mainly external hard drives, peerless drives, and CD/DVD burners. As always, YMMV.

Edit: another reason I'm partial to firewire is chaining - the ability to make the firewire connection from one device to another instead of all devices needing an equivalent plug on the computer. This is great for adding more than one external HD - just stack them and connect them.
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