# Western Digital 2TB USB Ext HDD



## SayWhat? (Jun 7, 2009)

Anybody had any experience with these? Amazon has them now for $99 shipped and I think I've seen them on sale for less at times.

In general, how fast is the transfer to/from USB drives as opposed to internal SATA drives??


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

Should have a speed slow 2 or 4 times then SATA, by default.


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## SayWhat? (Jun 7, 2009)

So, what is it, USB, FireWire then eSata for transfer speed?


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## houskamp (Sep 14, 2006)

Also depends on what you are doing with it.. is you are just doing backups (esp large files) you will run into drive speed limits way before you ever hit the limit of the interface on any of them..


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

It's never happen - each type of interface has overhead: system messages, headers for each packet, more for universal type like USB/IEE1394[FW] and less for SATA as it handled drives/CD/DVD device.


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## SayWhat? (Jun 7, 2009)

If you had your choice between a WD at $99 and a Seagate at $79?


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

If speed isn't a show stopper (and it rarely is with backup), USB is cheap and non-finicky. Neither of these attributes applies to eSATA.

Even if speed is an issue, many systems aren't particularly bogged down by the hardware; regardless of the _theoretical maximums_ detailed in the specifications. I find that with large directories, NTFS performance is usually the weak link.


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## neomaine (Feb 3, 2003)

I just picked up a couple of Hitachi Deskstor 3TB drives from Newegg, $119/ea. Transfer speed from internal SATA 1TB to eSATA was about 90-100MBs. I mount the new drive in a eSATA enclosure, do the copy, then swap out the drives. That part is tonight.

Above 2tb you should consider (and may be required for 3TB) using GPT instead of MBR for formatting. I mostly stream video from them so I set the sector size to 64k when formatting. Formatting took about 6 hours or so... 

My boot drive, an old 250gb is showing errors. I'm replacing two 99% full 1tb drives with two 3TB drives. One of the 1TB drives will become my boot drive and the other will go into on of the Dish DVRs. Probably the 211 since it doesn't have anything, the 722 can already record 40hrs/200hrs-ish.


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

P Smith said:


> It's never happen -


It happens all the time. If you hook a faster drive to the same interface, the combination will most likely perform better.


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## 4HiMarks (Jan 21, 2004)

I stay as far as possible from pre-built external drives. If the drive fails, the most likely point of failure is the enclosure, but if you open it, you void the warranty. You are better buying an internal drive and put it an enclosure yourself.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

That's where TT BlacX came ...


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