I am looking at this external hard drive and have read mostly good reviews on it..One thing that pulled me back was that several reviewers mentioned that the drive gets hot… My question is that, these external drives don’t have fans rite… then all of them must get hot… is it true? and if they do get hot, then they must have a short life span therefore causing a data risk..
How do you guys manage data? If you have recommendations of external hard drives, please mention.
Also, I was wondering which features or requirements to look for in an external hard drives....
For the one that i m looking at i.e.
Lacie 250GB F.A. Porsche External Hard Drive - USB 2.0 / 1.1
Rotational Speed: 7200 RPM
Cache Size: 8 MB
Maximum Transfer Rate: 480 Mbps
Access Time: 11 ms
External HD's enclosures do come with fans, atleast all the ones I have do. Just make sure the connection is USB 2.0 minimum or u'd be taking naps while doing file transfers. I didn't go for the ready made kind, bought the enclosures and drives separate, so was able to get better deals on HD.
Do internal HDDs have fans ? I mean dedicated fans for HD only? no, mostly they dont.
Most of the Externals (enclousures) do have fans. Unless you are running a 24/7 you would be shutting off your machine at least 2 hours in 24 hours each day. Thats more than enough for the HDD to cool down.
I work on VMs between work and home and needed something I can put in my pocket everyday. The best thing with these portable drives is that you don’t need the power cable. It runs off of just the USB cables.
thas nice... i didn't know setting up our own enclosure was that simple...
I will go for a hard drive with atleast 200GB with an enclosure that has great cooling features.. as this drive would be on 24/7 for the most part..
i have one question though... If i am working on Photoshop from an external hard drive or editing movies with lets say Adobe Premier... how much of a difference would i find from the regular IDE hard drive? The transfer rate for USB is 480MB/s .. what is the transfer rate for IDE drives ?
some hd cases do come with fans. Usually the cheap plastic HK enclosures. Beware as half thime they are wired wrong way around and only needed as plastic is used to manufacture the case. Fnas last a 4-6 months before they start screaming - dont use ballearing only a sleeve so dont last and nosiy. Plastic being a poor conductor of heat hence needd. I wouldnt think you would have any problems with that Lacie drive or any others made from reasonable thickness aluminium.
USb 2 has a theoretical limit of 480Mb not that it ever operates at that speed. You would get better performance through a firewire interface but both nowhere as good as IDe/Sata as USB requires CPU overhead. the device is emulated by drivers hence it's so versatile but can be cpu intensive depnding on implementation.
ATA-UDMA 133 will give you a maximum theroetical speed of 133 Mbytes/sec.
SATA can give you a maximum theoretical speed of 150 Mbytes/sec.
Ultra160/320 SCSI can give you a whopping 160/320 MBytes/sec.
USB2.0 works in synchronous transfer mode and has a maximum theoretical speed of 60 Mbytes/sec.
IEEE1394a (aka Firewire, iLink) works in asynchronous transfer mode and has a maximum theoretical speed of 50 Mbytes/sec. However, because of its transfer mechanism and lower packet overhead IEEE1394a will achieve higher throughput than a USB2.0 device.
The newer IEEE1394b works at a theoretical transfer rates of 100 Mbytes/sec.