External Hard Drive Question

[phantomhacker]

I'm trying to find a good external drive and I was looking at two western digital my books.

Which one of these should I choose?

1.Western Digital My Book Studio Edition 1 TB USB 2.0/FireWire 400/FireWire 800/eSATA External Hard Drive WDH1Q10000N

or

2.Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 1 TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive WDH1U10000N

[xcorvis]

Firewire is generally faster than USB 2 and eSATA is a lot faster.

Do you have a firewire or eSATA connection on your current system, or intend to buy a new system in the next two years that will have one of those connectors? If yes, buy the first one. If no, buy the second.

Alternately, do you want to edit video on the external drive or use it for other high throughput operations? Again, if yes, buy the first one. You might also need a firewire or eSATA card if you don't already have a port for one.

[burkhartmj]

If the price is the same, get the one with more connections [you have nothing to lose]. If it's within 10 bucks and you can utilize one of the extra [faster] connections, get the one with the extra connections [very little to lose].

[evoGage]

If you want pure speed then firewire.

[Freakazoid12]

If you want pure speed then firewire.

riiiiight.... so your saying that firewire is faster than eSATA?
where'd you get that bit of misinformation from? eSATA is much faster than even firewire 800 and several orderd of magnitude faster than USB 2

[tokenuser]

riiiiight.... so your saying that firewire is faster than eSATA?
where'd you get that bit of misinformation from? eSATA is much faster than even firewire 800 and several orderd of magnitude faster than USB 2Yep ... eSATA is about 6x fast than FW400, 5x faster than USB 2.0, 3x faster than FW800, [source (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA#eSATA_in_comparison_to_other_external_b uses)] but those numbers don't include the fact that IEEE1394 (FireWire) has a higher sustainable burst rate than USB. Theoretical maximums are great, but there are other overheads that skew the results in the real world.

Having said that, eSATA still kicks serious butt ... but will be outpaced by USB3.0 later this year. I suspect that eSATA will die a slow death, since it is a single purpose data port.

[evoGage]

riiiiight.... so your saying that firewire is faster than eSATA?
where'd you get that bit of misinformation from? eSATA is much faster than even firewire 800 and several orderd of magnitude faster than USB 2

Sorry for not making it clear enough :( my reply was intended that he choose option 1 over USB 2 if he wanted speed and not firewire in general, of course eSata is my first choice giving if I have a system that supports it.:rolleyes:

[burkhartmj]

Yep ... eSATA is about 6x fast than FW400, 5x faster than USB 2.0, 3x faster than FW800, [source (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA#eSATA_in_comparison_to_other_external_b uses)] but those numbers don't include the fact that IEEE1394 (FireWire) has a higher sustainable burst rate than USB. Theoretical maximums are great, but there are other overheads that skew the results in the real world.

Having said that, eSATA still kicks serious butt ... but will be outpaced by USB3.0 later this year. I suspect that eSATA will die a slow death, since it is a single purpose data port.

As long as eSATA can be used to RAID up an external drive to an internal, it'll stick around. Imagine the ease of doing RAID 1 with an internal and external, keeps the backup outside of the primary system, so if a physical tragedy happen [such as spilling a drink on a case with a fan and fan hole on top] so your data is safe, and it backs up in real time.

[tokenuser]

As long as eSATA can be used to RAID up an external drive to an internal, it'll stick around. Imagine the ease of doing RAID 1 with an internal and external, keeps the backup outside of the primary system, so if a physical tragedy happen [such as spilling a drink on a case with a fan and fan hole on top] so your data is safe, and it backs up in real time.Thats a great point, but it wouldn't surprise me if (given the speed of USB3.0) eSATA as an interface disappears. It should have the bandwidth to handle RAID 1 nicely even on highspeed drives.

[Freakazoid12]

Thats a great point, but it wouldn't surprise me if (given the speed of USB3.0) eSATA as an interface disappears. It should have the bandwidth to handle RAID 1 nicely even on highspeed drives.

I've been vaguely considering something like that myself... (thinking about 2 or 3 1.5TB drives in eSATA enclosures) Already running out of space on my ~5 month old fileserver. 2TB just isn't enough sometimes.
granted I used 4 750Gig drives, sad how you can now get almost that same capacity in one drive now.

[burkhartmj]

Thats a great point, but it wouldn't surprise me if (given the speed of USB3.0) eSATA as an interface disappears. It should have the bandwidth to handle RAID 1 nicely even on highspeed drives.

Probably once SSD's become cheap and ubiquitous [and HIGH CAPACITY] eSATA will disappear [unless they update the spec, which i think is planned, up to 6Gb/s], but currently, large platter drives max out at 200-250 Mb/s [barring 10K's, never owned one so don't know their speed]. Because of that, speed will have little effect on whether the connection dies. While it very well might push eSATA to the nerdy fringes [such as myself] because of the ubiquity and popularity of USB, frankly, it already is. I don't know anyone outside of a computer degree at college who even knows what eSATA is.

As far as USB3 taking over for RAID, speed wouldn't necessarily be the issue. The issue would be the fact that it's going through the USB bus to the southbridge, while the eSATA is part of the specific drive controller. The USB spec and design would have to be fundamentally changed to allow for real RAID. The only way around this, where speed WOULD play a factor, is if software emulated RAID with the USB3 external drive

[trunolimit]

So given the choice right now since usb3 isn't really around, eSATA is the way to go?