External Hard Drive

albertross_2

another 80GB for £2

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/130751/product_info/rb/0

Kamran

thats a pretty good deal. however,
1) Maxtor? its the first ive heard of them, any good?
2) what does it mean by 16MB cache?

Kam

edit:

The cache size on an hard drive greatly controls how fast you can copy files to a drive. Cache is high speed memory on a drive which acts as a buffer between the computer and the drive. When data pours into the external drive, sometimes the drive cannot keep up with the incoming data stream. When this happens, the high-speed cache memory will temporarily store the data, so that the computer can still send data quickly.
Eventually, the drive will “catch up”, and copy the data from the high speed memory to the drive itself. This allows the computer to still send data as fast as it can to the drive, with no noticeable slowdowns. The larger the cache on the drive is, the faster the files will copy over to your drive.

On the other hand, since the high speed memory used for cache is very expensive, models with higher cache sizes are considerably more expensive than models with lower cache sizes. When selecting a drive, keep in mind the size of the cache on the drive. Once you have compared and picked a drive with enough cache, you should now consider which interface is the best for your drive.




hope that helps someone. so, 1) is maxtor any good?

richyrichuk

maxtor anit a terrible make, but its not the best. use Seagate barracuda.

extremely reliable.

albertross_2

maxtor and seagate are same company now

richyrichuk

u still got the name on it. possibly diff built quality and warranty's

oldagetraveller

Most, if not all, of these ext'l hdds are USB2 connected. I'm sure the answer is yes, but will they work alright, with slower transfer, connected to USB 1.1?

b33r

Apart from my newer seagate which I haven't had long enough to cast a true opinion of, the external hard drive I have had for about 3 and a half years is a Western Digital and (touch wood) it has been perfect so far.

espresso

oldagetraveller wrote: »

Most, if not all, of these ext'l hdds are USB2 connected. I'm sure the answer is yes, but will they work alright, with slower transfer, connected to USB 1.1?

Yes USB 1.1 is about 10 times slower but it will work.

albertross_2

yes they are forwards/backwards compatible, but 1.1 is very slow for hard disks.

ormus

ive got 3 maxtors and 1 seagate barracuda. all work just fine. ive used western digital in the past and they were great too.

the only hdd,s ive had problems with, were the infamous IBM deathstars!