Which network Hard drive?

s-j-cooper_2

Which of these would be best for a home network, connected by a router?

Hard drive 1

or

Hard drive 2

Any advice is much appreciated!

Little_John

Neither, both use maxtor drives which are noisy and prone to failure.

Which would I go for? I dont know I would proberbly buy a NAS box and stick a Western Digital drive in it.

ManAtHome

I'm waiting for Gigabit interfaces, a 10/100 will be 1/4 to 1/3 the speed of USB2. Any particular reason why you don't want to add a drive to your main PC - either internal or just USB2?

NAS drives are probably more suitable if you have several PCs and don't have any particular PC on most of the time (office type environments). The NAS box is really just a limited computer in its own right.

xplo5iv

For a home network, bear in mind the noise factor - #2 has a fan and might be noisy!

I haven't got a NAS, but would like one (£!). Perfect for media files etc so that you can access them in the lounge, the office etc, without leaving a server on.

Absolute speed isn't relevant for most home NAS uses anyway, and on a 100mb LAN it will be great. Plenty quick enough for media files etc. It's not as if you're using it for the OS.

What difference would a 1Gbs LAN make to a 100Mbs drive? None! Ditto USB 2.0.

Jonathan

s-j-cooper_2

Cheers for your answers.

My pc does not have any usb 2 ports, just 1.1, so I figured I would use the ethernet port to connect the hard drive - or would this make little speed difference?

I have got a laptop that is from the school I work in. It is mine to use until I move schools, or I get a new one - which could be quite soon. I am not supposed to upgrade the laptop myself because of this.

s-j-cooper_2

There is also this Freecom drive at a similar price:

Freecom

Are these supposed to be any good?

ManAtHome

Network speeds are measured in bits, drive transfer rates in bytes - an ATA100 drive can (theoretically) transfer at 800mbits, nearly twice the max speed of USB2, 8 times the speed of a 100mbit network.

ps - s-j, a 100mbit network will be faster than USB1 (12mbit).