USB Hardrive, any good

**Kaizer** · January 22nd, 2003, 05:09 PM

Hi

Im concidering buying an USB harddrive. Im gonna use it for MP3, Games, Divx and other mulitmedia stuff.

Is these kind of hard drives any good?
What is bad about them?

The reason that I want a USB hard drive is so that I can take it to friends and easily share with them.

Any thoughts?

Here is the link to the one I have in mind

http://www.maxtor.com/en/products/ex...00le/index.htm

**Wizzard~Of~Ozz** · January 22nd, 2003, 05:26 PM

Games

I doubt it will have high enough performance to make this practical.

As for the rest, I'm not gonna comment on the legalities of "sharing" divx and MP3. (There is currently a thread going about it in Community)

These are really only good as storage drives, they lack the performance to make it a viable alternative to an internal HD.

**Nighthawk** · January 22nd, 2003, 06:32 PM

I have one of those USB keychain drives and found that I didn't use it as much as I thought I would.

If you aren't going to be giving stuff to your friends all that frequently, what I'd suggest is buying a mobile rack and putting an internal hard drive in it. The mobile rack adds something like $25-30 to the cost of an internal drive, and if your friends get a rack that'll take it they can just plug the hard drive in.

It's not only far cheaper but it'll be much faster, too.

**bhess** · January 23rd, 2003, 04:00 PM

Or get a USB drive enclosure. Look in Docs deals for one around $40. That way you could also use it with laptops.

I'm not happy with my drive rack since it's not really hot swappable like I thought.

**Nighthawk** · January 23rd, 2003, 08:22 PM

I think serial ATA supports hot-swap, so when they make SATA mobile-racks you can do it.

**DanU** · January 23rd, 2003, 09:46 PM

If you do decide to go with that, make sure you have a USB 2.0 port. I've used USB 1.1 drives and they are PAINFULLY slow due to the USB 1.1 bandwidth.

**iNeb** · January 23rd, 2003, 09:50 PM

I'm thinking about getting one for backup, that way i don't have all my eggs in one basket.

Any opinions?

**Wizzard~Of~Ozz** · January 23rd, 2003, 09:52 PM

For backup if you have a second internal drive use Ghost, then you can burn it to a re-writable media. You can also ghost to the same drive different partition then burn it.

**NiTCOM** · June 2nd, 2003, 02:07 AM

Originally posted by Kaizer
Hi

Im concidering buying an USB harddrive. Im gonna use it for MP3, Games, Divx and other mulitmedia stuff.

Is these kind of hard drives any good?
What is bad about them?

The reason that I want a USB hard drive is so that I can take it to friends and easily share with them.

Any thoughts?

Here is the link to the one I have in mind

http://www.maxtor.com/en/products/ex...00le/index.htm

The bad is they are slower than your IDE drives.
Sure, you need at least USB 2.0 or firewire to have
decent performance for a portable drive.
I like SMARTDISK they are quiet, nice looking and I haven't
had a problem yet.

Just don't get a portable Maxtor drive. They make great IDE drives but I read too much crap about the portable drives, bu
maybe you wanna see youself.

--NiTCOM

"the only way is up"

**NateTheGreat** · July 8th, 2003, 02:27 PM

I have a 30GB USB GO-G0 drive from
Bason computer.

It is a USB 2.0 drive, with an IBM notebook drive (4500rpm) inside it. With 1 yr. warranty, case and cable, it retails around 110$US.

It sure beats having a pile of CDs.
It is also super compact.
So far, at 2mo.s it has held up well.

However BASON also sells some larger (and faster) USB drives if you want something with a little more throughput.

Nate.

**Zaida2000** · August 15th, 2003, 07:28 PM

If you plan on buying something small (20 - 40 Gigs) then
USB 1.1 will be ok but slow
USB 2.0 musch faster and will do the job
But if you are planning on buying large drives (80 Gigs and above) then avoid USB all together, Firewire is much better and much more reliable .. i have all three running USB 1.1, 2.0 and Firewire, no comparision .. Firewire (which i hated earlier as a technology) is better by far ..