Which External HD

[Emrys Davies]

I have Win7 and WLM 2009

Thinking of getting an External 500GB HD, mainly for back-up purposes and am
trying to decide between these two:

Western Digital Elements SE or Segate Expansion.

Both are compatible with my OS and can be obtained from Tesco for around
£50.00, although the performance and ease of use will be my prime concerns.

Advice will be appreciated.

 

[Ed Cryer]

I have Win7 and WLM 2009

Thinking of getting an External 500GB HD, mainly for back-up purposes
and am trying to decide between these two:

Western Digital Elements SE or Segate Expansion.

Both are compatible with my OS and can be obtained from Tesco for around
£50.00, although the performance and ease of use will be my prime concerns.

Advice will be appreciated.

I wouldn't consider less than 1TB for an external drive.
Do you have a Staples store locally?
http://www.staples.co.uk/data-storage

Ed

 

[Steel]

I have Win7 and WLM 2009

Thinking of getting an External 500GB HD, mainly for back-up purposes
and am trying to decide between these two:

Western Digital Elements SE or Segate Expansion.

Both are compatible with my OS and can be obtained from Tesco for around
£50.00, although the performance and ease of use will be my prime concerns.

Advice will be appreciated.

I use a portable USB 240GB HD that I use between my personal and work
machines. It has my backups on it too. I have 170GB(s) of open
disk-space left, after three years of usage with the device. I just plug
it in and go.

 

[Seth]

I have Win7 and WLM 2009

Thinking of getting an External 500GB HD, mainly for back-up purposes and
am trying to decide between these two:

Western Digital Elements SE or Segate Expansion.

Both are compatible with my OS and can be obtained from Tesco for around
£50.00, although the performance and ease of use will be my prime
concerns.

Advice will be appreciated.

Both are good drives. The only real "advice" you'll get is in the form of
"Stay away from brand-X" from the person who had a drive from brand-X go
bad.

 

[Emrys Davies]

I wouldn't consider less than 1TB for an external drive.
Do you have a Staples store locally?
http://www.staples.co.uk/data-storage

Many thanks. Staples is quite near to me, but I never thought of it. Their
prices look very good. I will think about the 1TB, but I started out
looking for 320GB as I do not create much work at all and I am unlikely to
change.

 

[Bill Bradshaw]

They are both good brands. You just may want to check that you buy USB
3 (this may not be important to you).

<Bill>

 

[VanguardLH]

I have Win7 and WLM 2009

Thinking of getting an External 500GB HD, mainly for back-up purposes and am
trying to decide between these two:

Western Digital Elements SE or Segate Expansion.

Both are compatible with my OS and can be obtained from Tesco for around
£50.00, although the performance and ease of use will be my prime concerns.

Advice will be appreciated.

Make sure you don't get WD's Green series of hard drives or any that are
Advanced Format Drives (AFDs) or Smart Align Technology (Seagate).
These work by using 4KB sector sizes on the platter and translating in
their interface to 512KB; however, there is a problem is misalignment
since some versions of Windows start a partition at sector 63 instead of
64. You could end up with a very slow external hard disk due to
misalignment because of the need to do a read-modify-write instead of
just a write.

Read:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2888/2
http://dl.paragon-software.com/free/Paragon Alignment Tool - White Paper.pdf
http://www.paragon-software.com/technologies/components/partition-alignment/
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=805

This misalignment and 4K-to-512K translation used to be a problem with
SSDs (and why users should check alignment instead of just slapping in
an SSD and hoping it all works at peak performance); however, now that
hard disk makers are moving to 4K sized sectors, it's becoming a problem
there, too.

 

[Emrys Davies]

They are both good brands. You just may want to check that you buy USB 3
(this may not be important to you).

I have USB 2 so why did you say " You just may want to check that you buy
USB
3 (this may not be important to you)".

 

[relic]

Many thanks. Staples is quite near to me, but I never thought of it.
Their prices look very good. I will think about the 1TB, but I started
out looking for 320GB as I do not create much work at all and I am
unlikely to change.

It's nice to be able to retain multiple images of your system.

Both vendors make good drives. I prefer Seagate, but I would take the
WD...it all depends on price.

 

[relic]

I have USB 2 so why did you say " You just may want to check that you buy
USB
3 (this may not be important to you)".

USB 3 is twice as fast. It only makes sense if you use the external drive
constantly (and you'd need a USB Card if it's not supported on your
motherboard).
USB 3 is still slower than an internal SATA drive.

 

[bobster]

?I have used several WD320s for the last three years and have had no
problems. My computer has spare SATA ports so if your computer does, I
would recommend a SATAe connected external HD or a SATAe external enclosure.
My WD drives came with a SATAe cable for an external enclosure. My computer
is bootable from a cloned copy of my "C" drive located in the external
enclosure.

===============================================================================================================

"Emrys Davies" wrote in message
I have Win7 and WLM 2009

Thinking of getting an External 500GB HD, mainly for back-up purposes and am
trying to decide between these two:

Western Digital Elements SE or Segate Expansion.

Both are compatible with my OS and can be obtained from Tesco for around
£50.00, although the performance and ease of use will be my prime concerns.

Advice will be appreciated.

 

[DGDevin]

"Emrys Davies" wrote in message

I have Win7 and WLM 2009

Thinking of getting an External 500GB HD, mainly for back-up purposes and
am trying to decide between these two:

I wouldn't get any external drive that didn't have a cooling fan. For that
reason I use a couple of Vantec NexStar GX enclosures with drives from old
computers for backups. It you get an external drive without a fan, use it
only for backups and then turn it off to keep the drive from dying an early
death due to heat buildup in the enclosure.

 

[Lewis]

In message <[email protected]>

Many thanks. Staples is quite near to me, but I never thought of it. Their
prices look very good. I will think about the 1TB, but I started out
looking for 320GB as I do not create much work at all and I am unlikely to
change.

2TB drives are considerably less than 2x1TB drives. It's a lot of space,
but that is the best bang/buck point right now.

 

[Lewis]

In message <[email protected]>

USB 3 is twice as fast.

It's much more than twice as fast.

It only makes sense if you use the external drive constantly (and
you'd need a USB Card if it's not supported on your motherboard).

USB3 is smarter than USB2, so it puts less load on your CPU.

USB 3 is still slower than an internal SATA drive.

Current drives are, but the USB3 standard supports speeds above SATA's
current 3.0Gb/s speeds.

 

[Lewis]

Emrys Davies wrote:

Make sure you don't get WD's Green series of hard drives or any that are
Advanced Format Drives (AFDs) or Smart Align Technology (Seagate).
These work by using 4KB sector sizes on the platter and translating in
their interface to 512KB; however, there is a problem is misalignment
since some versions of Windows start a partition at sector 63 instead of
64. You could end up with a very slow external hard disk due to
misalignment because of the need to do a read-modify-write instead of
just a write.

4K sector drives are just fine under W7, XPSP3, OS X, or nearly any
Linux.

This misalignment and 4K-to-512K translation used to be a problem with
SSDs (and why users should check alignment instead of just slapping in
an SSD and hoping it all works at peak performance); however, now that
hard disk makers are moving to 4K sized sectors, it's becoming a problem
there, too.

All drives will be 4K cluster, and that is a good thing.

 

[David Simpson]

It's much more than twice as fast.

And a completely different port, not just a faster version of USB2.0

Current drives are, but the USB3 standard supports speeds above SATA's
current 3.0Gb/s speeds.

SATA III current speed is 6Gb/s, same as USB 3. But SATA III is not
normally a shared interface, which USB 3 is always shared, so USB 3 is
6Gb/s for all devices, where as SATA III is 6Gb/s is per drive. (not
that most drives are fast enough to even need the old Sata I 1.5Gb/s)
And since most USB 3 and SATA III are hooked to PCIe 2.0 x2 channels, all
of them are limited to 5Gb/s!!!!


--
_______________________________________________
/ David Simpson \
| (e-mail address removed) |
| http://www.nyx.net/~dsimpson |
|We got to go to the crappy town where I'm a hero.|
\_______________________________________________/

 

[Gordon]

USB 3 is twice as fast.

Yes! At last a real world figure.

Not the ten times theoretical figur

 

[Andy]

Should be only one choise Segate the only reliable drive made to day.
Western Digital is a crap product now a day's used to be the best made.

 

[Lewis]

Should be only one choise Segate the only reliable drive made to day.

Seagate externals are *not* reliable.

Western Digital is a crap product now a day's used to be the best made.

Agreed.

 

[Bill Bradshaw]

When you replace your computer it will probably come with USB 3 ports
which are faster than USB 2. A USB 3 external drive is backward
compatible with USB 2 so they will work with your USB 2 computer ports.
I have a couple of USB 3 externals and they work fine with my USB 2
computer ports.

<Bill>