Hard Disc Drive Types?

[Nominus Experse]

I have decided to purchase an external hard disc drive of considerable size (1 - 2 TB).

But what I am wondering is this:
What's the difference between USB and Firewire? Firewire is faster, right? And there's 400 and 800? What exactly do these mean?


Another question I have is this:
What are the advantages and disadvantages of each particular type of internal HDD?

ATA/IDE? (This is being phased out, as I understand, due to its slower speeds, right?)

SATA (Faster than ATA/IDE, since it has a 150 speed, correct?)

SCSI (I know nothing about this type)


A few other questions I have are as follows:

What is RAID?

Is there any possible way to make my external HDD accessible to other computers through a network or some such thing?

[rubah]

Re: the last question;

Yeah, it's pretty easy. You can right click the drive and go to 'share this drive' or whatever, and you'll give it a name you can access it from across your network. You set whether you want other users to be able to alter your files (yes if you plan on doing it or don't care, no if it's strictly for you sharing to them). To access it, someone will need to be in your workgroup (for fast justice, but not strictly required), and to know the name of your computer, and which share it is.

If my workgroup is DEADMEN (which is is), and my computer's name is SALVATION (which it is), stu would have to be a member of DEADMEN (on windows, OSX just shows all workgroups, and I assume that *nix is the same. I don't have a clue how a windows user would find a share not in their workgroup frankly), navigate to network places in windows (or probably Network in *nix), click the icon that says SALVATION, and a dialog will pop up asking which folder he wants to access.

Basically the same as folder sharing for any other folder.

You don't want an external usb drive? xD

[Nominus Experse]

Oh, I forgot to include some things within the post...
Sleep deprivation is bad for posting... I'll edit my post now.

And thanks for the reply, Rubah, that's easy enough to understand. I figured it was along those lines.

[Namelessfengir]

my question is what the hell are you doing that you need a couple terabytes of storage?

raid is a way of configuring two or more harddrives to back eachother up there are 6 levels of raid 0 - 5 to find out more search for RAID ARRAY

[o_O]

Don't bother with SCSI. :p It's rarely used for hard drives now (far more common with optical drives), and is inferior to SATA.

Don't bother with IDE either, since your transfer speeds will be kneecapped by the IDE specification. If you plan to use an IDE/USB adapter then it may be kneecapped by the speed of USB. I've never seen an external IDE port on a motherboard though, so they may or may not exist - I couldn't say. :p It'd be asking for trouble though, having to use a big IDE ribbon cable and a danger to all of the exposed IDE pins.

There are definitely motherboards with external SATA ports, however, SATA is the fastest option by far, but only if you can utilise the SATA interface. What I mean is that if you don't have an external SATA port on the computer, you're likely going to have to use a USB adapter, and then the transfer rate will be limited to that of USB. The SATA specification is capable of transfer speeds of 3GBs^-1 now, up from 1.5GBs^-1.

Basically what I recommend is that you go for SATA if you have the external port, or else just a regular USB drive if you don't (which is slower, but cheaper). :p

RAID is something completely different though. RAID is a disk setup that uses data redundancy to prevent data loss. Basically you a) have several drives with either the same data mirrored onto them, or b) you have data distributed across the drives in such a way that parts of files lie across two or more drives and losing data from one drive failure won't necessarily kill the whole file.

EDIT: Don't bother with Firewire. It's failed as a specification, so Apple have started phasing it out. You'd use it for video cameras mainly - it's very good for dealing with HD video. :p

[Nominus Experse]

Alright, thanks. A USB external HDD is shall be.


Namelessfengir, I need TBs of storage because I have maxxed out 750 gigabytes thus far, and need more space.


As a side note, I found a HDD that is almost $5k and I have no idea as to why. Just a curio, really.

Seagate Cheetah 10K.7 ST3146707FC Hard Drive - 146.8GB - 10000rpm - 200MBps Fibre Channel - FC-AL-2 - Fibre Channel - Internal - ST3146707FC-20TPK - Buy.com (http://www.buy.com/prod/seagate-cheetah-10k-7-st3146707fc-hard-drive-146-8gb-10000rpm-200mbps/q/loc/101/204520818.html)

[o_O]

That's 'cause it's a 20 pack, dude. :p

It's not helped by the fact that it's fibre channel (kind of like SATA/SCSI/ATA(IDE)), and fibre is expensive no matter how much you buy. :p

[crono_logical]

Don't bother with SCSI. :p It's rarely used for hard drives now (far more common with optical drives), and is inferior to SATA.
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EDIT: Don't bother with Firewire. It's failed as a specification, so Apple have started phasing it out. You'd use it for video cameras mainly - it's very good for dealing with HD video. :pSerial Attached SCSI is what we get on newer server models now :p Though that's actually backwards-compatible with SATA :p

Also, when did that happen to firewire? I still prefer Firewire over USB for HDs, since although the raw throughput may be specced lower for many devices (400 instead of 480mbps), the real performance is faster due to overheads with USB, and transfer speeds are more consistent especially with several devices connected at once daisy-chained :p Guess I'll hope there's external SATA connections on the next PC/laptop I buy if it's really going though :p

[Nominus Experse]

I found a couple external HDD on various sites, and I was wondering what you guys thought of them (basically, which one do you think is best, based on criteria of price and performance).

Fantom 1TB G-Force Hard Drive - Dual Interface (eSATA & USB 2.0), 7200RPM, 16MB - External Hard Drive - GF1000EU - Buy.com (http://www.buy.com/prod/fantom-1tb-g-force-hard-drive-dual-interface-esata-usb-2-0-7200rpm/q/loc/101/206821006.html)

Fantom Drives G-Force MegaDisk 1TB 7200RPM USB 2.0 - External Hard Drive - MDU1000 - Buy.com (http://www.buy.com/prod/fantom-drives-g-force-megadisk-1tb-7200rpm-usb-2-0-external-hard-drive/q/loc/101/202581102.html)

Newegg.com - Cavalry CADB001U32 1TB 7200 RPM USB 2.0 External Hard Drive - Retail (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822101055)

Newegg.com - acomdata PDHD1000USE-72 1TB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache USB 2.0 / eSATA External Hard Drive - Retail (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822216041)

Beyond Micro Monster Mobile 1TB External Hard Drive - 7200, 16MB, USB 2.0 BM1TMMU216M at TigerDirect.com (http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3206392&CatId=136)

Buffalo DriveStation Duo 1.0TB External Hard Drive - 2 x 500GB, 7200, 8MB, USB 2.0, FireWire 400 (Refurbished) RB-HD-W1.0TIU2R1 at TigerDirect.com (http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3618463&CatId=136)

[o_O]

Don't bother with SCSI. :p It's rarely used for hard drives now (far more common with optical drives), and is inferior to SATA.
.
.
.
EDIT: Don't bother with Firewire. It's failed as a specification, so Apple have started phasing it out. You'd use it for video cameras mainly - it's very good for dealing with HD video. :pSerial Attached SCSI is what we get on newer server models now :p Though that's actually backwards-compatible with SATA :p

Also, when did that happen to firewire? I still prefer Firewire over USB for HDs, since although the raw throughput may be specced lower for many devices (400 instead of 480mbps), the real performance is faster due to overheads with USB, and transfer speeds are more consistent especially with several devices connected at once daisy-chained :p Guess I'll hope there's external SATA connections on the next PC/laptop I buy if it's really going though :p

Well apparently I made that entire post up. I'm sure I'd read that stuff somewhere. It's not on Wikipedia, so disregard it, Nom! :p

I like the idea of a dual-interface USB/SATA drive. That means you can use it as an internal drive if you ever need to. :p

[Nominus Experse]

Heh, Face, you're funny.

Dual-interface does indeed sound quite nice. Options are always appreciated.

[crono_logical]

I did a bit of digging with firewire, seems like by default it really is slower than USB (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885222) under XP with SP2 with default device drivers due to some bizarre reason of Microsoft's - something I didn't expect to be crippled in SP2 along with TCP/IP. Perfectly fine and fast in SP1 though. Fortunately I don't use firewire disks on my XP SP2 machine, but there's alternative non-MS drivers, or a patch to restore proper speeds if needed :p

Also, I didn't realise 1 TB external disks are so cheap now - it seems so recent I only got a 500 GB one :p

If it's pure size you're going for though, don't go for the last one in your list, it says 2x500, which means if either of the two disks fail (two disks = double the chance), you lose the data on both :p That model's better for RAID1 if you need the reliability, but you'll only get 500 GB for the price of both disks. You might want to read the rest carefully too to make sure they're not doing something similar, where they're making the 1 TB by putting multiple disks together :p

[Nominus Experse]

Alright.

I think there was one other one that used 2x500 to create a TB, but there may have been two more.

[Tasura]

when I bought my 250's a couple years ago they were expensive. I'd go with the acomdata one, they seem to be a reliable bunch.