transfer rate of external hard drives versus internal

D

dmehling

Member
I'm trying to figure out if there is a speed advantage for internal hard drives versus external USB hard drives. Current SATA drives claim to be able to transfer data at 3 Gb per second, but the mechanical nature of the hard drive will prevent it from even coming close to that rate. So it seems to me like a USB hard drive will probably not be any slower, especially if it's running at the standard speed of 7200 RPM. Is this correct?
 
Internal drives currently are faster but USB drives aren't too far behind. For small file transfers you may not notice a differnce but larger files will certainly take longer via USB then it otherwise would have with an IDE or SATA drive.
 
The major speed difference for file transfer, is the data transfer rate for USB2 compared to the data transfer rate of internal drives, rather than the speed of the drive itself
 
USB 2.0 can transfer at a maximum speed of 480 Mbit/s. Where as a modern Sata HDD can transfer data at either 1.5Gb/s or 3Gb/s. That will be the main factor to the speed at which data is transferred.
 
More or less its down to the drives themselves, like the newer 7200.12 seagate claims up to 160Mb/s trasfer rate while 120Mb/s is the transfer rate on the 7200.11 drives. But you gotta remember that usb is limited to 60 MByte/s (480/8 give you megabyte rate) max transfer rate.
 
Get an external hard drive with eSATA forget USB :D

If you get an eSATA external hard drive it should have no problem keeping up with an internal hard drive.
 
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