Looking for a Secondary Hard Drive

Hi, I'm thinking about taking out my Seagate 500Gb hard drive out and use it with an esata enclosure (is it gonna be faster than normal USB external HDDs?") since I need an external hdd. So, any recommendation for that?

Also, I'm gonna replace that hdd with a 640gb or a momentus xt 500gb. Since I already have an SSD for OS, do you think it's worth it to get the XT? I do have some applications and most games installed on the harddrive instead of ssd.

Thanks.

 

An eSata external should be much faster than USB unless it's limited by the drive. eg. My Hitachi 7200 rpm 500GB drive gets 30MB/s with USB but 95MB/s with eSata.

I can't comment about the XT though.

 

Alright thanks for the info. I should be getting similar results since my drive is the same as yours.

 

The XT is best used as a primary drive. As a secondary drive it doesn't deliver as many benefits.

As a secondary drive you could look at the Samsung HM640JJ, 7200rpm.

 

I have an XT as a secondary drive and i disagree with phill... the Momentus XT is an excellent drive.. i transfer data from my SSD to HDD and the momentus has humongus burst speeds.. i can transfer a 2-3GB file in 30s or lower with high transfer speeds.. in excess of 100MB/s sometimes.... get the XT for sure..

 

nvm

10char

 

The cost benefit and power consumption of the XT as a secondary drive is poor. Transfer speeds are similar with any high density drive, even some 5400RPM ones. The whole point of the XT is the 4GB SLC memory, which is useless in a pure storage drive.

 

Iirc even Seagate says that the XT is intended as a primary drive.

 

Yeah, I've decided to go for the Samsung HM640JJ. Thanks phil.
I'm quite happy with my current speed so I'll just go for the storage.

Any good e sata enclosure out there? or are they all the same except from design?

 

This is the fallacy that I see in many people looking for external drives. Performance really doesn't matter all that much on an external drive, once you are above a certain level of performance.

Think about what people do with their external drives - they use it to either archive documents/content, or they use it to store media (videos, images, , etc) and serve it back up later. Neither of those activities require tremendous amounts of speed.

A standard 7200rpm drive is more than sufficient to meet the performance needs of either of those two use cases. Yes, having more speed is certainly a nice-to-have. But the price of a single Seagate Momentus XT 500GB is about $130... twice the price of a traditional 7200rpm 5000GB mehcanical hard drive. I don't doubt that the Seagate Momentus XT is faster - I'm sure it is. What I do doubt is whether it is worth the money.

 

I can barely find any powered eSata enclosures?

 

That's because eSATA doesn't have powered connections as a requirement. That is why I don't like it for use as an interface for mobile drives. USB 2.0 is superior to eSATA in every single way, except for pure transfer speed.

When it comes to external drive interfaces, performance isn't everything.

 

Let me clarify..meant an eSATA+USB cable. They have these dual cables where it gets the power from the USB in the combo port in most laptops...

 

Is this thread what you're looking for?

 

thanks! rep.