Help Buying External HD

[hhara]

Lately, I have been looking around for some external hard drivers. I have a few questions though. I hope I don't upset anyone with my questions that may have been already answered in this forum.

Is it worth it to buy a external HD with eSATA, Firewire, or anything other then the standard USB 2.0? I ask because it seems most of these external hard drives have your normal 7200 rpm SATA II 3GB/s hard drives. If you can only write to the hard drives at 20-40 MB/s what is the advantage of having something transfer data faster then that, such as ~400 MB/s (USB 2.0) or ~2 GB/s (eSATA). If my numbers are wrong please correct me - I am going off of a specification sheet from a external western digital drive.

What are some other reliable brand names for external hard drives? The only external hard drives I have seen in person are the Western Digital ones, and they look really nice and very small physical size. I am pretty partial to nothing smaller then 1 TB and I would like reliability (no mirror setup as that is too costly).

Got any tips on what to look for in a external hard drive? I want to make sure I get something worth my money.

Right now I am thinking of getting the Western Digital My Studio 1 TB edition but if its pointless to get eSATA then this HD is pretty much pointless. Something tells me I am wrong though.

Thank you in advance for the help

 

[dC0m]

WD and Seagate both make great external drives. Most other external hard drive companies only build the enclosure and use a major brand HD inside.

Of course, it's worth buying a external drive with eSATA, or firewire. That is, if the output you're plugging into supports it.

Another alternative is that you can build your own. Choose a good external enclosure and get yourself a internal hard drive and put them together. I bought a Rocketfish external enclosure not too long along (which I'm still trying to sell!) and it supports eSATA, USB, and firewire plus, you can connect 2 USB devices though it so it acts as a USB expansion also.