Hard Drive in USB/Firewire Caddy........Comments sought.....

emzee · Post by **emzee** » Tue Jul 15, 2003 7:41 am

I'm planning to mount an 80G drive in an external caddy and use USB2 for data transfer. This would give me bursts up around 400+MB/s.

Why? I'm gonna be mainly using samples, read off the hard drive, and this seems an economical way of getting plenty of notes through plenty fast.

The caddy will be mounted internally in the computer case (Antec 1080 takes 2 external drives I'm told).

Any comments welcome and wanted.

jupiter8 · Post by **jupiter8** » Tue Jul 15, 2003 8:45 am

I didn't quite understand everything you wrote but a few pointers.

You have to differ between megaBITS and megaBYTES.
If you're only reason to go USB2 is that you think you can load a full CD in 1.5 sec. you will be really dissappointed.

While USB2 has a theoretical upper limit of 480 Mb/sec , it is mega bits and not bytes.
Real life performance is around 30 megabytes/sec.
Which by the way is slower than Firewire even though the upper limit for FW is 400 Mb/sec. But in real life FW is fater than USB2.

Either way, they both use IDE drives internally with a converter chip so an IDE drive should be even faster.

So unless you are going to have an ext. drive (you were'nt clear on that point.An ext. drive inside the case??) you'd better go for an IDE drive. Faster and cheaper.

If i misunderstood something i apologize.

emzee · Post by **emzee** » Tue Jul 15, 2003 10:18 pm

Hey thanks for that response. My understanding is that the "sustained rate" of data transfer for most hard drives through IDE, USB, and Firewire is about 30 megabytes per second.

However the "burst rate" is about 100MB/s for IDE, and about 400Mb/s for USB and Firewire. I probably was getting my bits (Mb/s) and bytes (MB/s) confused. The websites only use the shortened versions.

"Tom's Hardware" found that Firewire is faster than USB2 in an ongoing work situation. However the board I plan to buy (Intel 865Perl) only has USB2 on board. I thought that USB2 would still be plenty for me.

So would this give me (at 2 bits per byte) a burst rate of around 200 Megabytes per second, which is still twice that of ATA 100?This speed is apparently between the onboard cache on the hard drive, and the motherboard, as is the claimed 150MB/s for SATA 150, which I believe is also a "burst rate".

I thought this would be very useful. The caddy is around $75AUS, which I find cheap if it doubles my "burst rate" of transfer.

I'm planning to hand over $$ for my system very soon, so any comments appreciated.

I'm a bit confused.

[ This Message was edited by: Mikka on 2003-07-15 23:20 ]

[ This Message was edited by: Mikka on 2003-07-16 02:24 ]

[ This Message was edited by: Mikka on 2003-07-16 02:26 ]

emzee · Post by **emzee** » Wed Jul 16, 2003 2:00 am

Found my own answer....Guess I just needed to talk about it. "Tom's Hardware" gave the answers I wanted. The drive caddy they reviewed transferred data at half the speed USB2 was capable of. Thanks, jupiter8, you were right, I'll save my money.

[ This Message was edited by: Mikka on 2003-07-16 03:01 ]

[ This Message was edited by: Mikka on 2003-07-16 03:01 ]

Immanuel · Post by **Immanuel** » Wed Jul 16, 2003 4:07 am

1B(byte)=8b(bit)

emzee · Post by **emzee** » Wed Jul 16, 2003 4:25 am

Oh....Danke

jupiter8 · Post by **jupiter8** » Wed Jul 16, 2003 8:17 am

Even if USB should have twice the thruput, you have to remember that it is an IDE drive connected thru IDE to a converter chip.
So IDE would still be the bottleneck.

emzee · Post by **emzee** » Wed Jul 16, 2003 9:47 pm

Thanks again jupiter8.

My choice now is a Seagate ATA V, 80G with 8M cache, or spend a bit more and get a Raptor SATA 36G, 10,000rpm. (Price difference about $80 AUS). I prefer to keep things simple and just run one hard drive. I'll save each session to CD initially then maybe to DVD when I can afford one.

Do you think I'd notice the difference between these two? I'm running 1GB of Dual Channel DDR 400. My rationale is that if I spend a bit more now, I'll get better performance and a longer life on my system, so I won't have to upgrade as soon. I seem to get better value buying higher end components and upgrading less often.

At the end of the day, I just want to make music and not fiddle with my system. That's why I'm putting the effort in now. Any comments much appreciated.

Post by **garyb** » Thu Jul 17, 2003 2:16 am

On 2003-07-16 22:47, Mikka wrote:
I'll save each session to CD initially then maybe to DVD when I can afford one.

THIS would be a good place for an external usb or firewire drive and a big one.saving to cds is a drag.it's sllllooooowwww.an external hd of 120 gigs or better is at least as reliable as a cd (a very unreliable storage medium

)and much faster to work with,both up and download.

as to performance,sata sure looks impressive.i just wonder if the rest of the computer will notice....ata100 works about as well as 133 for audio and i've seen it published that 66 is more than sufficient.we are always encouraged to buy the fastest drives rpm-wise for audio regardless of the transfer speed though.i'm guessing that the sata drive is obviously superior,but again,is sata FULLY implemented yet?(judging from nestors experience, i'd say "probably not")

emzee · Post by **emzee** » Thu Jul 17, 2003 6:14 am

Thanks for those comments. I believed CD was a better storage device than HD...until your comment.

Re: SATA.....Do I REALLY need it? Probably not. Will it improve in the future? I understand it will be much faster in 2-3 years. So why will I buy a Raptor? When I walk down the street, I'm gonna feel smug knowing that MY hard drive spins at 10,000RPM while most people only have 7200RPM.

(That, and the 5 year warranty).

It's a bit like pissing in a wetsuit. It gives you a nice warm feeling, but nobody else knows about it.

[ This Message was edited by: Mikka on 2003-07-17 07:17 ]

[ This Message was edited by: Mikka on 2003-07-17 07:20 ]