external hard drives

[Mr. Tingle]

I know this is not quite the right forum but here goes..

how much will a slower drive 4200rpm (USB2) effect playback of songs? Will it make a big difference?

[pc, xp, IBM T41 laptop, T1.6]

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

[mandolarian]

It could be a problem with large track counts or DFD sample playback. But why take the chance? Why not get a 7200rpm 8meg cache USB2 drive? Unless....

[Mr. Tingle]

bus powered, extra portable and simple

[mandolarian]

Watch it! You don't want to get your hardware setup so convenient that it never distracts from making music. Oh, wait, they have software to do that now.

Still you might want to consult tomshardware.com to view the performance of these drives. You can get 7200rpm laptop drives...I think a 4200rpm drive is just so last century.

[braj]

I don't know much about the busses between the drive and the lappy, but I've heard that using an external via FW or USB2 was possibly slower than the drives can actually read/write at if they were internal IDE, so you lose performance by going external. Again, don't know how true that is.

[titanium]

Here's a SOS article about USB vs FW drives.

Sustained read throughput is highly dependent on raw drive performance, and less so on interface transfer rate. Things like larger cache and faster spindle tend to give better performance. FW is slightly faster than USB 2, due to lower comm protocol overhead.

Code: Select all

         transfer rate   MBytes/s
USB2     480 MBits/s    ~20-30
FW       400 MBits/s    ~20-30+
ATA-133  133 Mbytes/s   ~40-60
SATA-1   150 Mbytes/s   ~50-70?
SATA-2   300 Mbytes/s   ~120-140?
SATA-3   600 Mbytes/s   ~way faster than you need for audio.

More info than you needed:
Wikipedia article on IEEE 1394/FireWire
Wikipedia article on USB
Wikipedia article on ATA
Wikipedia article on SATA

[Mr. Tingle]

apparently buss power drives can only go upto 4200rpm.

but i just tracked one down at 5400rpm, great.

seek time: 12ms
bytes per sector: 512
cashe: 2Mb
track-to-track seek time: 2s
average sector latency: 5.5ms

I wonder if these stats are ok?

[beebul]

Just taken delivery of a nice Freecom 7200rpm 250gb, 8mb cache, USB 2 drive for my expanding projects and it's the biz

Came with a free 64mb memory stick too, which was nice.

Only £120 GBP on eBuyer.

Well recommended! ___\o/___

[polaris20]

bus powered, extra portable and simple

I'd get an OWC 2.5"-based Firewire HD, with the Hitachi 7200rpm 60gig drive. Bus-powered, fast, and expensive!