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    Questions about external hard drive.

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by jf2oo6, Jul 15, 2008.

  1. jf2oo6

    jf2oo6 Notebook Geek

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    I am looking into purchasing an external. I want something that is portable and can run off my laptop without any outside power. Can you guys give me some recomendations on what brands are good to look at? I also want as much memory as I can get in a portable drive. and if I can i would like to save some of my programs on to it too, like games and videos and things like that.

    Also I have been reading somethings about firewire. Can someone please explain to me what that is. And also how do I know if my laptop has it? I have a couple month old vaio FZ4000.
     
    jf2oo6, Jul 15, 2008
    #1
  2. powerpack

    powerpack Notebook Prophet

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    To your last question even though USB 2.0 is theoretically faster because of over head demands firewire is faster. To the the second you have the option to buy any HDD and buy an enclosure? 2.5 as a rule might not need external power source?
     
    powerpack, Jul 15, 2008
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  3. K-TRON

    K-TRON Hi, I'm Jimmy Diesel ^_^

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    You are looking for a mobile harddrive, it is about the size of a graphing calculator. They use mobile laptop harddrives, which use less power than standard desktop harddrives, allowing you to run the external harddrive off of the usb hub.

    The firewire port does not provide power, so you will need a power supply if you want a firewire based external harddrive. USB provides 500mah of power, so you dont need an external power source

    firewire is theoretically slower than USB. firewire can do 400megabits per second while USB can do 480mega bits per second. However their are 8 bits in a byte, so the speeds are 50mb/sec and 60mb/sec respectively. Pay attention now, you will most likely never get 60mb/sec out of USB, because the speed of USB depends on the speed of the USB hub inside the laptop. USB 2.0 can range from 5mb/sec up to 60mb/sec, so the speed of the one in your system is really dependent on what usb hub it has.
    The firewire hub s a little different in which it always runs at 50mb/sec, so it is actually faster than USB.
    USB in most laptops is around 20-30mb/sec in speed, which is slower than firewire.

    K-TRON
     
    K-TRON, Jul 15, 2008
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