5400 HD and External?

[shoryukenz]

I'm looking for a new 3.5" hard drive to put in an external enclosure mainly for backing up photos. Should I go for a 5400 or 7200 rpm drive? I've heard that USB 2.0 speeds will be the bottleneck and 7200 rpm will just be a waste? is that true?

Thanks for the help!

 

[WhatTheSchmidt]

I picked up a my passport WD 500gig for $100 shipped...Yes it's USB2.0 but I use it for music / movies / other storage

I don't know if I will backup dvds / burn dvds from it though since I think that would really push the USB limit.

Nice thing about it is no external power needed for this guy, very small and quiet. Had to reformat to NTFS.


Unless you need to constantly move a gigabyte of photos I think you will be fine using USB. To really try to answer your question though...I'm not sure - when you get an external drive and it's not esata you obviously aren't too worried about speed. Costs more to power that faster drive too. I would be more concerned with access times if you aren't moving large chunks of data constantly.

 

[shoryukenz]

well it will be for transfering large amounts of large 25mb photos at a time. so it might be like 10GB transferred each time I load some photos