external vs network harddrive

I just ordered the new dell Xps Notebook 2.33ghz with all the bells and whistles. My desktop is a p43.2ee with a Terrabyte of Hard drive space in a raid 5. I am going to delay a new desktop order for about 6 months to a year. I will buy a really nice external monitor and make my xps my main machine for awhile. so I was wondering. Should I buy a good large external Harddrive for my xps or do you think I would get enough data transfer by just using my desktop on the network. Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

Data transfer over a network will be much faster. If you have a gigabit connection, it will be faster than firewire or usb 2.0.
So setup an ftp server or shared folders (however you want to share resources) and do it over the network.
On a sidenote... You'll have ot be plugged in to the network. I believe transfer over wireless will be about the same speed as firewire, but still faster than usb2. at least, i think it will be.
I plugged my laptop up to the network last night, transfered like, 40 gigs of data in less than 30 minutes. I was hitting roughly 10-12 megaBYTES/second . Thats fast.

 

Thank you!

 

WiFi is not as fast as usb2, but unless you are transfering large amounts of data it is probably not a big deal. If you are plugged into gigabit ethernet you'll get faster tranfers.

 

how do I tell how fast my connection is to the network?

 

Well, most wifi is only 54 Mbps vs 480 Mbps on USB2.

JC

 

If you want to know transfer rates, and know the file size or sizes,dividing the file size by the network bandwidth will give you an " estimate" of transfer times.

 

How do I find the network Band width. I will not be using the Wi Fi for large data transfers. I will have it plugged into the router.
If I am correct yes my laptop that I am using right not says 54mbs on wi fi. My local areal connection on my desktop is 100mbs so that would mean that firewire would better ( a external hard drive ).

 

If I bought a 1 gig ethernet card for my desktop would this work. Or am I limited by the motherboard in regards to networking speed.

 

Unless you bought a PCI-E card, you're going to be limited by the PCI bus for maximum network performance.

Question on the network storage device - with the enclosures and drives that don't cost $1,000, aren't you limited to using FAT32 as the file system? If that's the case, I would rather use USB 2.0 or firewire and then set up file/folder sharing within Windows to "network" it.

 

I am a little confused as to what you are meaning regarding the fat32. I have a external harddrive now that is 160g that is NTFS and my PC is NTFS whitch is the machine that would be on the network that I would use for my external storage since it has a terrabyte of Harddrive space.

 

I got it worked out for anyone that is interested. My pc has a 1 gig ethernet my new laptop has a 1 gig ethernet so I just need to by a 1 gig ethernet switch. Thus the pc and laptop will communicate before going though the router. This will be twice as fast as a external hard drive via fire wire.

So for $70 dollars I can have access to a Terrabyte of storage that is on my pc.
Both Computers have to be pluged in to get these speeds. But still I will be able to use this storage over the WI-FI I will just be limited to my WI-FI speed which I would expect to be somewhere around 54 to 100mbs.
Thankyou everyone for there help and input.