Buying an External HDD - Any Tips Welcomed!

Andrewgosu

Andrewgosu

The Silent Pandaren Helper
Reaction score
716
Hello,

Like the title says, I'm going to buy myself an external HDD and because it's my first time doing so, I might as well ask some tips. I'm planning to use it in conjunction with my laptop; price range 100...150$; I haven't decided on whether to get a "tower" or a more portable (with no extra power-feed) one; basically I want something more reliable even if it's not as big in size as other less reliable counterparts (e.g. 750GB more reliable beats 1.5TB less reliable).

Of course, any general tips are also welcomed (2.5'' vs 3.5'', I have no idea).

Andrewgosu
 
If your laptop has an eSATA port I would recommend getting just a hard drive. Tis what I'm doing (except min is in a case that isn't really an "external" case o_o It's the caging from inside my friend's computer case which happens to be identical to mine :D).

It works pretty well and you can cool it with USB powered fans :D

I did this and it's a pretty sick setup.

If you don't have eSATA, you could just get any old HDD and get your own case.

If you've got cash to spend, I would recommend at least a 10000 RPM HDD and, if you can find one, a 3.0 USB enclosure. I'm not sure if 3.0 enclosures are out there yet though.

Otherwise, generally any external HDD works fine, but the thing you would want is the fastest transfer rate or you'll be waiting ages copying files back and forth.
 
Cool!

I'm not really sure if that's a good price as USB 3.0 is new, however it seems reasonable for an external hard drive with a casing already and USB 3.0.
 
What do you mean by "good price"?

I'm not buying that from ebay but from a local store -- it's a bit more expensive there, though.
 
Good price as in are you getting a good deal for it :p

I.E. Are you getting overcharged or not.

I can't be sure because USB 3.0 is new and I haven't seen much of it.

The only USB 3.0 I have is my laptop which has a single USB 3.0 port.
 
Ah, I see.

The price for a similar adapter via ExpressCard slot varies from 25-30€ as much as I have seen
-- ebay or some other online shops sell it a bit cheaper but you have to pay extra for transport services so roughly it makes the same price.
 
Now if I think about it, wouldn't the capabilities of my laptop HDD affect the transfer rates, as well? To put it metaphorically, wouldn't the circumference of the narrowest point of a pipe determine the speed of the flow?
 
Only if the laptop's hard drive read/write speed is lower than the external hard drive.

USB 3.0 is not faster than the hard drive :)
 
My laptop has this HDD:
HITACHI Travelstar 5K500.B

It has a SATA 3.0Gb/s interface and according to wikipedia "the maximum uncoded transfer rate is 2.4 Gbit/s (300 MB/s)".

Again, according to wikipedia USB 3.0 with SuperSpeed feature is "reasonable to achieve 3.2 Gbit/s (0.4 GB/s or 400 MB/s)".

Though yes, I'm going to use an adaptor plugged into my laptop's ExpressCard slot and it's going to be slower than native USB 3.0 ports.

Maybe I am wrong because my knowledge at the moment is just based on the research I have done.

SATA 3.0Gb/s is faster than USB 3.0?


Here's another question:

The above mentioned speeds sound really nice, but can they be somehow achieved in reality?

I mean, I tested my laptop's HDD and its transfer rate is around 12MB/s (read) with DiskBench (around 8.5MB/s when copying a file; file used: a normal 720p quality 4.7GB movie).

Of course I'm not expecting to achieve the theoretical maximum speeds but 12MB/s feels a bit slow after I've seen the numbers.
 
Not really sure :p I'm not a hardware engineer, but I'd say that it's reasonable to believe that your HDD will either not bottleneck anything or it'll be unnoticeable. Like by kilobytes.
 
If you want speed, go for one of the solid state disks (SSD) that are out now. Not really worth it for just archiving stuff on an external disk but good for stuff you will commonly be accessing.
 
Yeah, I think it will balance out in the end.

As for solid state disks -- yes, they're great and fast but I'm going to store vast amounts of data and just need capacity over high-speed.

Though I'm keeping my eye on them, as I might build a computer in the future and booting from a SSD sounds nice.
 
What's the point in buying a USB 3.0 connector when it plugs into a USB 2.0? You're not going to transfer data any quicker. The USB 3.0 connectors in the harddrive are backwards compatible to 2.0.

Yeah, 3.0 is fast. Capable of speeds of 5gbps transfer, but that doesn't factor in that your harddrive can't if its a SATA. Maybe if it's a Solid State Harddrive, but no other reason. Plus the external harddrive isnt a SSD either.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
General chit-chat
Help Users
  • No one is chatting at the moment.
  • Varine Varine:
    I don't think he ever figured out how to do the calamari in a pan though, like idk how to do that either. He was afraid of the at home deep fryers though and it's like yeah, that's fair, I am too
  • Varine Varine:
    He was just such a sweet old man, we had two servers pregnant and they held a baby shower together, he was soooooo fucking excited to get to see a baby. Unfortunately he died a month or so before they were born
  • The Helper The Helper:
    So I decided to Google some people that I had not seen or heard from in a while and sure enough one of my old best friends, we had a falling out years ago but whatever, find out he died of Pancreatic Cancer in January. I have also lost a few of my closer acquaintances from growing up the last year. Getting old - people die - I kinda thought it was going to be this way a few years ago....
     +2
  • The Helper The Helper:
    Forum running super slow again
  • Ghan Ghan:
    Not really clear from the stats as to what is causing the slowness.
  • Ghan Ghan:
    We get a lot of guest traffic so it may just be the load is getting too high and not from any particular source.
  • Ghan Ghan:
    Looks like the server is maxed out on CPU.
  • Ghan Ghan:
    Oh it looks like a lot of the traffic is Silkroad Forums. That domain isn't protected by Cloudflare.
  • Ghan Ghan:
    But the old Silkroad site is still on its own server. I just had a test site set up on this server for it.
  • Ghan Ghan:
    I just disabled that test site. Let's see if that helps the load.
  • Ghan Ghan:
    Looks much better already.
  • The Helper The Helper:
    I had actually forgot about the Silkroad site. I had asked
  • The Helper The Helper:
    SD Ryoko about it and he said the couple of people left on there really like it, that was a few years ago, maybe I should check back
  • jonas jonas:
    I guess when you're getting old, and the last day of soup season draws near, you start wondering
  • jonas jonas:
    will I make it to the start of the next season? or was this the last time I'll ever have my favorite dish?
  • The Helper The Helper:
    I am doing my first Vibe Coding project. In installed the environment and tools according to instructions but it is all chat doing this for me at my direction. It is fun really and holy shit I might finish in 2 hours what it would have taken a day to in my Access and this would be an electron app complete new
  • Ghan Ghan:
    Good stuff.
  • Ghan Ghan:
    Just make sure it is secure. :)
     +1
  • The Helper The Helper:
    It will only be on internal network
  • jonas jonas:
    Man the AI is good about gaslighting about security though. I've had several times where I pointed out security problems and it tried to convince me that with a tiny tweak it suddenly becomes secure
  • jonas jonas:
    Like using a distrobox as a "secure" container, and when I point out that's not secure at all, it claimed that specifying home will make it secure
  • The Helper The Helper:
    Yeah I finished the app today and it is bad ass. Like ChatGPT codes way better and faster than me that is for sure. The app is unsecure AF though and I would never put it anywhere it was obvious. I did not even show it today, the boss never made it in, but I showed the office and they liked it and frankly, I do software for a living and I am qualified to judge this kind of stuff and... Holy Shit this is a game changer. It took me around 4 hours to finish the app from design to end and that is much faster than I could have done it in the outdated MS Access the thing it replaced was in. Good Stuff! Had tons of fun doing it too! Work has not been fun in a while - today was fun!
  • The Helper The Helper:
    And really, I did not do it, chat wrote all the code I just pasted it in, tested it, acted like Chats eyes on it and just learned. I learned VS Code, how to use the Terminal and a bunch of Powershell and Command stuff, I used Git for the first time and learned how to save, search, start my server, stop it, run the tests, do some debugging - all the freaking fun stuff - chat wrote all the code
  • The Helper The Helper:
    I think the key was the 40 minutes of that 4 hours that went into the design of it. The thing was fully specced out before we started and the only reason it took so long was I had never done any of it and had to get used to the navigation and workflow.
  • The Helper The Helper:
    React, JS and AG Grid are the tools that I know i used along with git. I learned alot but it will be a minute before I fully understand everything I am doing in these environments because I am really just following instructions.

      The Helper Discord

      Members online

      No members online now.
      Online now:
      344 (members: 0, guests: 344)

      Share this page

      Affiliates

      Hive Workshop NUON Dome World Editor Tutorials
      Top