External or internal?

[See-Fu]

With USB 3.0 are external mechanical drives any slower than internal SATA III drives? I know SATA III has a higher maximum transfer speed but I don't think mechanical drives can even reach USB 3.0's max transfer speed yet.

 

[drescherjm]

Only a few mechanical drives are faster than the 150 MB/s that SATA I provides. None come close to exhausting USB3 bandwidth.

 

[See-Fu]

So it woudln't make any sense to spend more on a internal drive correct?

 

[bigddybn]

The internal drive will outperform a USB3 connected device. A lot more factors than raw bandwidth involved.

http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?p=2544394

Are you running disk intensive programs off of this disk or just looking for raw storage? If storage then go USB3 no doubt IMO. Much more flexible solution.

 

[Aesma]

SATA drives usually have a better warranty.

 

[robvas]

Externals are often cheaper

 

[Fort_Major]

Externals seem to die a lot sooner (from my experience). Seems Q/A either on the hard drive or the controllers might be lacking a bit for external.

 

[evilsofa]

You can sometimes have the best of both worlds. Because of the way the market works, external drives tend to be much cheaper than internal drives. You can pop open most external drives, and take the internal drive from within and use it as an internal drive. You will often even find on the manufacturer's website that the internal drive has a better warranty than the external drive it came from did. The trick, though, is knowing beforehand what's inside. Keep a close watch on this forum and the HotDeals forum and you may get reports of a good internal drive in certain external drives found at certain brick&mortar stores. Fair warning, though: what internal drives end up in what external drives can change quickly, and you may end up with, for example, a 5900RPM drive with a 1 year warranty instead of the 7200RPM drive with a 3 year warranty you were hoping for.

 

[See-Fu]

Right now I'm using a 7+ yr old hard drive that's storing all my games and also acting as a storage drive for all my videos,phtoos, documents. I'd like to move all of this onto a new drive before the drive fails.

 

[Aesma]

You should have that data backuped up ASAP, on an external drive if it suits you. Backup means there has to be two copies, so you could also replace your internal drive by a newer one.

 

[See-Fu]

Everything is already backed up on an external drive. I'm just looking for a replacement now.