External Hard Drive - buffer necessary etc.

mychineseburns

Hi,

Been looking into a new external hard drive, around £70 for 500GB and am wondering what difference a lack of 16MB buffer would make?

I'm looking particularly at the Western Digital My Book 500GB and the Western Digital Elements 500GB drives as I currently have a 250GB my book and am very satisfied with both the performance and price (wd drives seem to be well priced on amazon). The my book has the buffer, the elements drive doesn't and I'd be grateful if anyone can let me know how much of a difference this could make, as I've only really been looking at drive speeds, transfer rates and seek times. (don't need anything super fast, just a decent performer).

Also, any further advice/current ridiculous bargains would be great!

Cheers,

Andrew

everythingblogcast

Go for the Seagate 500GB from http://www.play.com it comes with 5 year warrenty. And go via www.quidco.com for cashback.

mychineseburns

Thanks for that, looks pretty good so will definitely be considering it.

Anyone know how much difference a lack of buffer will make to the performance if I was to go with a cheaper one however?

Andrew

everythingblogcast

Really it does not matter about the buffer, what you want with a hard drive is the longest warranty on it.

What are you going to use the external hard drive for?

Blacksheep1979

everythingblogcast wrote: »

Really it does not matter about the buffer, what you want with a hard drive is the longest warranty on it.

What are you going to use the external hard drive for?

Of course it matters - depending on what you want it for. It will affect the read/write speed.