External vs Internal

B

bcomatts

Member
Just about to buy another HD, thinking external, are there any issues with external drives? It's seriously ok to have a 300 gb USB drive (i dunno just sounds weird). What's the speed difference? Anything else?

-Thanks

ps... how fast is the transfer rate of IDE? USB 2.0 is 480mbps right?
 
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You'll never get nearly the transfer speed from an external drive as you will an internal one, and internal drives are cheaper for the same size of disk. I had an external a while back that said if you turned off the computer without disconnecting the drive through windows, you could lose your data. I don't know if this was true and I would assume if it was, things have progressed since then, but I thought that was kinda weird. The only advantage to an external drive, assuming you have space for an internal one, is that it's much easier to transport data with it.
 
(Updated)

USB 2.0 max transfer rate: 60 MB/s
ATA133 max transfer rate: 133 MB/s
IEEE 1394a max transfer rate: 50 MB/s
IEEE 1394b max transfer rate: 100 MB/s

(MB/s measured as megabytes per second)

I'd definitely go internal over external unless you plan on swapping the drive often. Not even firewire can achieve the transfer rates that you'll get with an internal IDE drive, but if you're going to go external I'd go 1394b, for obvious reasons.
 
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u only may lose data if you didnt disable cache on disk. when i used a usb2 external the most i gotten was 25mbps-30 with an internal regular ata i scanned the speed with nero and got around 66-80mbps
 
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