External Hard Drive Performance

[SimpleSi]

Does anyone use a USB2 harddrive for anything other than backups.

Basically, I've got problems with my secondary old 120GB internal IDE drive and I was thinking of replacing it with an external USB2 one.

I mainly use it for data storage (TV Shows and music and backup of children's school data held on other computers) but it would be handy if I could use it to capture video as well.

Anyone use one for that and does it do the job?

regards

Simon

[CyberNerd]

External SATA for speed.

[mrforgetful]

But I believe you'll find the following problems unless your system is new:

You won't have onboard eSATA ports so will need a controller card.
PCI has a data rate that is too slow to offer any benefits of the eSATA connection so the controller cards are only available in PCI-Express or PCI-X varients.
PCI-Express cards are around £40, PCI-X cards are around £120.

[CyberNerd]

PCI has a data rate that is too slow to offer any benefits of the eSATA connection so the controller cards are only available in PCI-Express or PCI-X varients.
PCI-Express cards are around £40, PCI-X cards are around £120.

True that 64bit/66MHz is nice for 500+MB/s but 32bit/33MHz PCI is still 132 MB/s which is comparable with eSATA and better than USB2, so to say PCI eSATA doesn't have any benefit isn't true (although it would suck if you have a gigabit ethernet on the same bus)

Surely PCI SATA cards are available? I was under the impression ESATA is just an adaptor ?

[mrforgetful]

You can get adaptors yes.