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CostaSaint

Joined: 08/11/08
Posts: 89

Fastest USB 2.0 external hard drive new

#971421 - 21/02/12 03:23 PM

Does anyone know what it is?
I appreciate that the speed will be slower than Firewire but I am stuck with USB 2.0 at the moment but surely some 2.0 hard drives are faster than others.
My old Maxtor is struggling and it's time to buy a new one.
Thanks.

PS on another post I saw that there are some hybrid internal drives are there any external ones like this?

Edited by CostaSaint (21/02/12 03:24 PM)

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Pete Kaine
Scan Computers

Joined: 10/07/03
Posts: 3159
Loc: Manchester

Re: Fastest USB 2.0 external hard drive new

[Re: CostaSaint]
#971437 - 21/02/12 04:56 PM

Mechanical drives will be limited to around 140MB/s due to the physical nature of the product, which is still USB 1 Speeds.

The Hybrid one's might help, but I suspect you won't really see much diffrence unless the SSD section of the drive is able to cache your entire project/sound bank.

ESata connnections are faster, but you'd be looking at some sort of SSD to take advantage of those speeds.

If your current Maxtor is a few years old I imagine it's running around between 80MB/s & 100MB/s if your lucky so you might see, say around a 20% - 30% increase using a new external but it's not going to blow you away by any means.

--------------------
ScanProAudio & 3XS Audio Systems
ScanProAudio Blog

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tim_obrien

Joined: 04/07/06
Posts: 116

Re: Fastest USB 2.0 external hard drive new

[Re: CostaSaint]
#971957 - 24/02/12 02:42 AM

Just make sure the drive is 7200rpm and not the slower 5400rpm (many are).

Larger on-board cache helps too.

Best bet - get a combo interface drive (my Glyph has usb2, fw400, fw800 and eSata) then you can run in on ANY computer and choose the fastest port you can.

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Dishpan

Joined: 01/09/04
Posts: 773

Re: Fastest USB 2.0 external hard drive [Re: Pete Kaine]
#972093 - 24/02/12 05:07 PM

> Mechanical drives will be limited to around 140MB/s due to the physical nature of the product, which is still USB 1 Speeds.

????

USB1 is capable of around 1mb/sec, WAY below what ANY mechanical drive can deliver. Even USB 2 is way below a mechanical at a real-world sustained transfer rate of around 35MB/sec

> ESata connnections are faster, but you'd be looking at some sort of SSD to take advantage of those speeds.

Not at all. An ESata connector and a modern mechanical drive will give you around 100mb/sec sustained rate, around triple what a USB2 based system can provide. Sure small buffers and lots of random access will reduce this considerably but you'll still get benefits including native command queuing which USB doesn't support.

> If your current Maxtor is a few years old I imagine it's running around between 80MB/s & 100MB/s

If it's USB2 it's running between 25MB/s and 35MB/s max.

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