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    any point in a external 7200rpm usb drive?

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by TedDemen, Feb 26, 2008.

  1. TedDemen

    TedDemen Notebook Guru

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    im planning on buying an external 3.5 drive for my music production laptop, and so i need the best performance for read/write speed as well as quiet operation.
    (disk will be used for sample storage which is accessed frequently)

    ASIDE from an eSATA interface which can support really fast read/write speeds and actually utilize 7200rpm performance....

    if one was to buy an USB2 or a firewire external drive/enclosure... is there really any point in buying a 7200rpm drive since it will be bottlenecked by usb2 or firewire?

    the reason im asking is because i dont have eSATA on my laptop so im forced to go with usb or firewire enclosure, and since the quietest drives out there right now are the WD GreenPower (aside form solidstate ofcourse) drives which spin at 5400rpm
     
    TedDemen, Feb 26, 2008
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  2. brainer

    brainer Notebook Virtuoso

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    Firewire is always good :S
     
    brainer, Feb 26, 2008
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  3. Budding

    Budding Notebook Virtuoso

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    There will be a performance increase, as the HD will be able to find the data it is looking for quicker. However, transferring that data via the USB/FW interface will bottleneck performance.

    Therefore, processes which require plenty of read/writes of small amounts of data will benefit the most from the higher RPM. Processes which read/write large quantities of data infrequently won't benefit too much.
     
    Budding, Feb 26, 2008
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