Anyone with a USB 2.0 external drive?

[Rico]

Been getting tempted by some of the very inexpensive external USB 2.0 drives out there for backup.  I'm curious if anyone is using one of these regularly and how they find the transfer speeds?  If for example you store video content, music, photo's, etc. is it still pretty quick to access?  I know roughly how the speeds would be but I'm looking for some real world experience.  Normally I've just added drives to my PC directly, but my PC is getting a bit full right now. 

[X]

I've used a few here and there and I haven't experienced any problems with them. I've also used them to store media for various things like imported shows that I wanted to watch over at a friend's home. There haven't been any issues. I say go for it. Depending on how much you want to store, you might get away with using flash drives as they now go over 2 gigs and are having a serious price drop.

[moyer777]

I have one at work and one here at home, and I love it.  It works fairly fast.  The only time it takes forever is when I'm backing up my itunes storage folder.  But really, not too bad.

I have a Western Digital 100 gigabyte here and a 500 gig at the church.

So far, so good.

:)

[billybob476]

Theoretical bandwidth is 480kbps so think of it as 2 or 3 times faster then streaming over a wired network (since you'll never actually get the full 480). Performance tends to be reasonable enough for normal uses. Unless you need a 10K RPM drive for any reason the usb connection is all right for transfer.

[KingIsaacLinksr]

I have one at work and one here at home, and I love it.  It works fairly fast.  The only time it takes forever is when I'm backing up my itunes storage folder.  But really, not too bad.

I have a Western Digital 100 gigabyte here and a 500 gig at the church.

So far, so good.

:)

I've never actually had my 500 GB one (which is my only one) on an ethernet connection, but the transfer rates between the two hard drives is very fast.  Like its transfering between folders.  I have no complaints.  Initial set-up is semi-annoying, but It wasn't too bad.  The back-up software I think needs to be updated because it has issues with scheduled times to start back-up.  But otherwise, its great.

King Linksr

[wraith1701]

I use a couple of external USB drives, and  there is no detectable difference in the amount of time it takes to load and play video or audio files.  The only lag time I ever experience is when copying large files from one drive to another. 

[moyer777]

I use a couple of external USB drives, and  there is no detectable difference in the amount of time it takes to load and play video or audio files.  The only lag time I ever experience is when copying large files from one drive to another. 

What you said.  :)

[davekill]

I've used a USB 2.0 Maxtor  "OneTouch" mini portable drive for a couple of months now - works great. I have a Maxtor triple interface drive for large video files at work ( I prefere "Firewire" over USB 2.0 for video - call me old fashion).
One the other side, run - don't walk away from the "I/O Magic" USB 2.0 portable drives. Worst drive I have ever owned, it should be called "I/O Terror"

[KingIsaacLinksr]

I use a couple of external USB drives, and  there is no detectable difference in the amount of time it takes to load and play video or audio files.  The only lag time I ever experience is when copying large files from one drive to another. 

Forgot to mention, that the same goes for me.  No lag at all.  As far as I can tell its like adding 500 GB to the original Hard Drive.

King Linksr

[KAMIN]

Hi Rico,
          I use 2 external drives both USB, at the start of this year I upgraded my PC to SATA drives. I was using 4 drives in my PC, one 80GB for the operating system (this was internal) and then 3 250GB for storage these were removable. In the upgrade I changed the removable drives and caddies to SATA type this left me with 3 250GB IDE PATA drives left over. I used one in a build for a friend and the other two I used in external drive caddies which I added to my main PC. This gives me a total of just under 1.2TB.As for their performance, I am "over the moon" with them I have backed up most of my family photos, work and personal data to one of them the other I have made available to my home network of 5 PC, s for the rest of the family to back up any of their data. The transfer speeds are fine even across the network, I am sure that using SATA drives the speed would be even faster. I would highly recommend using external drives for back up, also removable drives for more flexibility although hi quality caddies are a MUST I am using Vantec's an awesome piece of kit. I attach a picture of my tower so you can see what I mean. 
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[psikeyhackr]

I have an automatic backup with nnCron Lite.

http://www.nncron.ru/

Every three hours it runs a batch file copying all changed files to the external USB.