questions about external HDD

few questions about external HDDs (planning on picking up a 1Tb model tomorrow).

1) i can partition external HDDs, right? e.g. 160Gb as a backup partition for my lappy's internal drive, one partition for photos, and another one for movies/data.

2) if i can indeed partition the external HDD, plug n' play will still work, right?

3) what kind of transfer speeds can i expect from a 3.5" 7200rpm 1Tb disk in an external case via USB (with AC power supply)?

4) any precautions necessary in terms of cooling?

5) will it be noisy as hell?

6) can i boot from the external HDD? would like to play around with Linux & maybe Windows 7 without wasting space on my internal drive.

that's all for now. thanks in advance for your insightful answers

 

1) Yup
2) Definitely should
3) No idea. Should depend on USB transfer speed though.
4) I keep mine standing mostly. Right next to my laptop & printer. Saves space.
5) Depends on the drive itself. Usually during read/write, but not so much when idle.
6) Tried booting XP from a portable HDD once. Didn't load at all. Try waiting for someone whose done it as well.

 

I've seen people boot from external USB HDD's just by setting the USB to primary boot option in BIOS.
Example: My buddy bought a new HDD, took out the old one from his laptop(without formatting), put it in an enclosure, installed new HDD in laptop, changed BIOS priority and it booted right to the external.

 

i thought USB transfer speed is always 480mb/s?

 

speed is not always 480mb/s. It usually doesnt even see it full potential most of the time. You will probably get 30-40M B/s even though your hard drive can go faster.
If you want the full potential of it i suggest using an esata enclosure and then get maybe an expresscard esata to attach to your laptop. That way you will get the full speed of the external hd. And you will def. be able to boot of it.

 

another question: could i copy an image of my current HDD (160Gb) onto the external HDD (1Tb), then completely wipe the internal HDD and install Windows 7? the point being of course that i should be able to re-load the backed up image of the Vista setup i have now and it'll work again if i find out Windows 7 isn't worth it.

 

yes, i think its called disk manager in windows. though im not sure why you want to do this, instead of just dumping it into one partition. just create a folder perhaps?

yes, certainly.

i think it should be around 4mb per second.

not really, if the room get really hot, like more than 30c. i suggest you turn the aircon on.

depend on the drive and the casing. but in general, the drive will be whisper quite. and definitely wont be "noisy as hell".

not sure, but in linux or mac os x, you required to use different partition scheme, and also, the drive needs to be a FireWire one. USB is unlikely. you might be able to boot windows from e-sata drive though.

 

if you have the necessary software then yes.

i dont think windows home premium has that volume shadow copy feature. i belive it is only on vista business, ultimate, maybe enterprise also.

you can get third party software though.

 

another question: what kind of speed can i expect for copying data from one external HDD via a computer to another external HDD?

 

Hi.

I suppose it depends on the hardware used, but usb2.0 max transfer is approx 28-35mb/s

My WD 500GB 7200rpm external only get around 29mb/s max

Regards

John.

 

On a 7 USB Hub I can get a maximum of about 8MB/s - maybe 10MB/s often more 6,5MB/s

3 external HDDs on that USB Hub...

 

well, HDD arrived today, looking sweet so far. definite clicking sound (indexing?), but doesn't really bother me. transfer speed from internal HDD is about 28-32mb, happy with that.

thanks for all the answers guys