Just picked up this baby from CompUSA for $149. So far its been good, SiSoft Sandra gave decent benchmark results (dont have figures now)
From what Ive heard, this performs better than a WD but lesser than a Seagate. I knew Seagate would be a better choice, but at this price, the AcomData looked better.
Do any of you own this, or the WD or Seagate? I would be interested in knowing your experiences.
Thanks!
I don’t have any experiences with these drives being mounted in an USB2.0 enclosure, so I can’t give you any detailled information.
What I can tell you though, is that no modern IDE drive is used at it’s full potential when mounted in an external enclosure (the USB 2.0 system is a bottlebeck, despite the potential bandwith of about 60mb/sec). Based on that knowlegde I’d assume that the disk inside the enclosure doesn’t affenct the speed that a much. Somehow I think that the USB->IDE convertor is more responsible for the performance than the disc itsself…
FYI: Overall Firewire is best for external hard drives.
@Ssseth Why do you think so? Technically USB 2 has more bandwidth (480 Mbps) than Firewire (400 Mbps).
@Dee-ehn - What you said sounds interesting. Any details on why the IDE2USB convert aint that efficient?
Originally posted by ExpertTech
[B]@Ssseth Why do you think so? Technically USB 2 has more bandwidth (480 Mbps) than Firewire (400 Mbps).@Dee-ehn - What you said sounds interesting. Any details on why the IDE2USB convert aint that efficient? [/B]
USB 2.0 has indeed more bandwith than FireWire A has. Despite the higher bandwith, USB 2.0 is still outperformed by FireWire. I guess this has to do with efficiency, but I;m not sure about that.
Same goes for the converter story: I don’t exactly know where the performance loss comes up, but I think it’s got something to do with the coversion from the one to the other protocol (IDE (parallel) to USB (serial)) and the overheads of both protocols.
Originally posted by ExpertTech
@Ssseth Why do you think so? Technically USB 2 has more bandwidth (480 Mbps) than Firewire (400 Mbps).
Originally posted by rdgrimes
Only on paper… … My external HD maxes at about 22MB/sec on USB2, about 31MB/sec on firewire. (read speeds)
Posted here.
I also read a bencmark on one website which mentions that Firewire hard drives are a tad faster than USB 2 drives. This came as a surprise to me. Anyways, I feel that I should keep my USB 2 disk as is (though I’, still within the 14-day return policy 
).
However Its also interesting to know that DVD burners behave the opposite. USB 2 DVD burners are a tad faster than Firewire burners (finally some theory proves true!).