External harddrive

Its slightly bigger then a vidjo cassette, and if you put it on a wooden desk upstairs, be prepared for a low hum permeating through the house.
 
Ok, thanks for that car. Komplett are selling a Seagate (they have a good rep?) external drive, roughly the same spec, but with firewire connection, so I might go for that eventually (firewire is faster than USB, right?).
 
CCOVICH said:
(firewire is faster than USB, right?).
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No - USB 2.0 is nominally 480Mbps. FireWire 400 (previously plain old FireWire) is nominally 400Mbps. However the protocol overhead for USB is higher than for FireWire so, in practice, they shoud perform about the same. FireWire 800 is c. 900Mbps though but it's not that common yet as far as I know. If you Google for terms like "USB", "FireWire" and "speed" you'll find lots of useful detailed articles comparing the different technologies.

If you're looking for a portable drive then note that only 2.5" and smaller enclosures can be powered directly from USB/FireWire/PS2 ports without the need for an external power supply.
 
On a related note, does anyone know an Irish supplier of USB-IDE adapters? Those I'm particularly interested have a 2.5" and 3.5" connector on a single cable. This would be for temporary access to the drives, so I don't need an enclosure. There are lots of these adapters on ebay, but the postage is usually rediculous.
 
Why confine yourself to Irish suppliers? You can buy these from lots of online retailers all over the world and probably get a better deal into the bargain.
 
Can I just ask with regard to the USB-IDE adapters. My eyes have just lit up!!! My desktop PC recently died (motherboard) but I am told that the internal HD is fine. Obviously I want to get the information off the HD (never got round to properly backing it up.. don't ask!).

With these USB-IDE adapters, could I take the HD out of my dead PC and, using the adapter, connect the HD to my laptop and d/l the data?? Please say it would be this easy!!!

Edit: just found which looks intersting...
 
I think you would at least still need a power supply to your hard drive. [broken link removed] do a complete encapsulated unit. I had the same issue as you and it done the job perfect. You will have to change a little link on your hard drive to make it a "slave".
 
Thanks SineWave. Had a mooch around Maplins and came across [broken link removed]

I think that this will do the job. With the gadget you bought, was it straightforward?? This could be the answer to my prayers... I'll have to ring them tomorrow to see if they have it in stock...
 
ClubMan said:
No - USB 2.0 is nominally 480Mbps. FireWire 400 (previously plain old FireWire) is nominally 400Mbps. However the protocol overhead for USB is higher than for FireWire so, in practice, they shoud perform about the same.
Click to expand...
I just love it when AAM talks dirty like this... :D
 
ClubMan said:
No - USB 2.0 is nominally 480Mbps. FireWire 400 (previously plain old FireWire) is nominally 400Mbps. However the protocol overhead for USB is higher than for FireWire so, in practice, they shoud perform about the same.
Click to expand...

True in probably the vast majority of cases nowadays but just be careful if you have an older PC that you have USB 2.0 and not the older slower USB 1.1.
 
ClubMan said:
No - USB 2.0 is nominally 480Mbps. FireWire 400 (previously plain old FireWire) is nominally 400Mbps. However the protocol overhead for USB is higher than for FireWire so, in practice, they shoud perform about the same. FireWire 800 is c. 900Mbps though but it's not that common yet as far as I know. If you Google for terms like "USB", "FireWire" and "speed" you'll find lots of useful detailed articles comparing the different technologies.

If you're looking for a portable drive then note that only 2.5" and smaller enclosures can be powered directly from USB/FireWire/PS2 ports without the need for an external power supply.
Click to expand...

Thanks. I was under the impression that Firewire was faster than USB for data transfer.

Can you explain "protocol overhead" (I've Googled, but too technical for a number cruncher like myself), does this mean that you need a fairly powerful machine to extract the full benefits of Firewire? Given that I have a mid-range (at best) laptop, I guess USB 2.0 will be fine?
 
FireWire 400 (400Mbps) would be faster than USB 1.1 (c. 12Mbps) but comparable to USB 2.0 (480Mbps). As mentioned above check which you have. If you only have USB 1.1 then you would be better off using FireWire 400 for high speed applications (e.g. an external drive). Obviously FireWire 800 is faster again but is still not that common as far as I know. Those speeds are the raw theoretical speeds. I'm not au fait with the USB/FireWire protocol details but basically with most data transfer technologies not all of the bits transferred are raw data bits but some are for header information, delimiting packets, retries, start bits/stop bits, error correction etc. etc. This is what I meant by protocol overhead. It would not be unusual for certain data transfer mechanisms to use up c. 10% of the raw bandwidth for protocol overhead so that the effective data transfer rate (i.e. the number of data bits transferred per second) would often be sifnificantly lower than the war theoretical maximum speed of the medium. From what I've read the USB protocol overhead is higher than that for FireWire so the raw speeds of 480Mbps and 400Mbps result in similar data transfer speeds. Hope that explains things a bit more?
 
Thanks again ClubMan. It certainly sounds like it's not worth paying extra for Firewire. I'm pretty sure that I have USB 2.0.
 
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