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Internal Vs External Speed...

G

GeForceX

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Mar 19, 2003
Messages
4,172
Does anyone know the speed comparing from an internal hard drive to an external hard drive using USB 2.0, with 7200 RPM?

Considering SATA can reach up to 150 MB and USB 2.0 can reach up to 480 MB, I might be confused here...

I know that, "Internal will always be faster than an external" considering they have to go through several hops from out to inside the machine. But I could be wrong.

-J.
 
Well, USB 2.0 is 480 Mbps, not MBps. On the same scale, SATA-I is 1500 mbps to USB's 480mbps, Megabit != Megabyte. That's where your confusion came from. It's a marketing thing - bigger number is faster right? :rolleyes:

In addition, USB 2.0 often proves unable to use all of the bandwidth it does have - 400mbps FireWire is actually faster for many applications. Also, USB tends to be a CPU hog, and going over an external bus, as you suggested, adds additional latency.

With that said, The best you are going to hope for out of a USB drive is 40MB/sec. A Modern 7200RPM drive on SATA can achieve transfer rates above 60MB/sec in the fastest outer zones. So yes, SATA is quite a bit faster, and a modenr hard drive can saturate both Firewire and USB. Even the new Firewire 800 is barely able to keep pace with a modern hard drive transfering from the outer zones.
 
Ahhh, duh!!!!! MBps. Mbps. Shrug. Thanks for the clear up. ;)

-J.
 
I have a Hitachi 80GB 7200rpm PATA drive which I keep in a BAFO USB2 case - when I transfer data from or to this drive from my Maxtor SATA drive I get about 24 MB/s. At times I transfer this drive to the main case and use it like a regular PATA drive - when it is connected directly to the MoBo with a ATA100 cable I get data transfer rate between the same pair of drives of about 46 MB/s.
 
Basically, as a storage drive, external is fine. But if you plan on doing anything transfer-intensive, put it in your case. I have a few USB2 drives being used for storage, and they work just fine for that purpose.
 
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