External hard drive advice for windows vista

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jaybird555
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p.1 #1 · External hard drive advice for windows vista

I need to purchase a reliable external hard drive that will connect to a USB port to store raw pictures with at least 2 TB and feedback will be very much appreciated. Thanks Jay

Feb 12, 2013 at 02:00 AM

Bifurcator
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p.1 #2 · External hard drive advice for windows vista

Fastest drives I've used in a long time are the Barracuda 3TB (ST3000DM001) units from Seagate. They can sustain about 230 to 255 MB/s both read and write. And... they go for about $100 ~ $130 right now - depending how hard you're willing to look. Two of them in RAID0 often approach or slightly exceed 500MB/s. http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1187066/0#11327992

Seagate Barracuda drives have a good rep for lifespan and this particular model (with only 3 platters - 6 surfaces) should be extra exceptional in that regard. It is a 7200 RPM drive tho so you can't jostle it around while it's spun up.

USB on vista, really? I guess that means USB 2.0?

The most you'll get out of USB 2.0 is like 30MB/s Writes and 40MB/s reads. But you'll get the full speed of the HDD if you install a USB3.0 card (often less than $50). If you must use USB2.0 then I would buy 5400 RPM Green drive - just whatever is cheapest and don't worry about it. They're slow as sheet but you'll never know the difference over USB2.0.

For connecting the USB cable to the drive I like dock cradles the best myself.

Feb 12, 2013 at 09:19 AM

eskimochaos
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p.1 #3 · External hard drive advice for windows vista

Delete Windows Vista while you're at it.

Feb 12, 2013 at 11:36 AM

Alan321
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p.1 #4 · External hard drive advice for windows vista

No such thing as a reliable drive. It will fail eventually. You need more drives as backups to prevent loss of info.

If you want the best performance then avoid usb 2.0 and get a twin drive kit running in RAID 0 (striped) mode. That'll work faster but doubles the chance of failure, so again you need a backup.

You'll also improve overall average speed if you get a bigger drive than you think you need and partition it so that you normally only use the first half or so. e.g. use 2-3TB partition on a 4TB hdd.

- Alan

Feb 17, 2013 at 05:44 AM

WAYCOOL
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p.1 #5 · External hard drive advice for windows vista

Bifurcator what benchmark are you using? Or where did you get your figures?

Feb 17, 2013 at 03:43 PM

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p.1 #6 · External hard drive advice for windows vista

WAYCOOL wrote:
Bifurcator what benchmark are you using? Or where did you get your figures?

His figures are off. I've tested 3 of the new Seagate 3TB 3 platter drives and the most I can get is about 200MB/s max and about 160 MB/s average sustained read speed. Those numbers are consistent with what others are reporting. Here is the HD Tune test on one of my drives.

To the OP, I would suggest using a pair of external hard drives that you rotate on a periodic basis. Hard drives are the most vulnerable part of a modern computer system, and redundancy in your backup is well worth the extra $100 or so you would spend for a second drive. The new Seagate 3TB 3 platter drive mentioned by Bifurcator is a good option, and they are amongst the fastest consumer mechanical drives you can buy today for sequential I/O, which is all you need for a backup drive. You can also look at the Western Digital Red 2TB or 3TB drives that are designed for NAS usage and support TLER. And Samsung and Hitachi make good storage drives as well.

Also, you want to use an external SATA interface (eSATA) to connect to your external storage if your motherboard provides an eSATA port. If not, I would recommend buying a PCIe controller card that provides eSATA or USB3.0 ports as this will offer much higher bandwidth than USB2.0. The Seagate drive can push 5 to 6 times the bandwidth of USB2.0 and will be severely throttled by a USB2.0 connection.

2013 © aubsxc

Feb 17, 2013 at 04:35 PM

mhayes5254
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p.1 #7 · External hard drive advice for windows vista

What are you doing with the images on these drives. Editing, occasional viewing, backup? It makes a big difference in what is worth doing.

Feb 17, 2013 at 11:14 PM

Bifurcator
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p.1 #8 · External hard drive advice for windows vista

aubsxc wrote:
WAYCOOL wrote:
Bifurcator what benchmark are you using? Or where did you get your figures?

His figures are off. I've tested 3 of the new Seagate 3TB 3 platter drives and the most I can get is about 200MB/s max and about 160 MB/s average sustained read speed. Those numbers are consistent with what others are reporting. Here is the HD Tune test on one of my drives.

To the OP, I would suggest using a pair of external hard drives that you rotate on a periodic basis. Hard drives are the most vulnerable part of a modern computer system, and redundancy in your backup is well worth the extra $100 or so you would spend for a second drive. The new Seagate 3TB 3 platter drive mentioned by Bifurcator is a good option, and they are amongst the fastest consumer mechanical drives you can buy today for sequential I/O, which is all you need for a backup drive. You can also look at the Western Digital Red 2TB or 3TB drives that are designed for NAS usage and support TLER. And Samsung and Hitachi make good storage drives as well.

Also, you want to use an external SATA interface (eSATA) to connect to your external storage if your motherboard provides an eSATA port. If not, I would recommend buying a PCIe controller card that provides eSATA or USB3.0 ports as this will offer much higher bandwidth than USB2.0. The Seagate drive can push 5 to 6 times the bandwidth of USB2.0 and will be severely throttled by a USB2.0 connection.

Now put two of them in a RAD0 in an INTERNALLY controlled (chipset) MacPro RAID and then you can comment with relevance!

My average across the first 40% is about 440MB/s (with occasional accesses in the 500MB/s range - just like I said), the next 20% or so is about 400MB/s average and then it drops off after that of course. And this is consistent across ALL my benchmarking tools. I have 6 or 7 of them installed. They can't all be wrong and I'm sure I didn't get "special" drives or anything.

Feb 18, 2013 at 02:17 AM

aubsxc
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p.1 #9 · External hard drive advice for windows vista

Bifurcator wrote:
Now put two of them in a RAD0 in an INTERNALLY controlled (chipset) MacPro RAID and then you can comment with relevance!

Putting two of them in RAID 0 will not make individual drives faster. If a single drive can sustain 200MB/s on its fastest sectors, then two drives in RAID 0 could theoretically sustain a maximum of 400MB/s acting together. In reality, this number would range from about 300 to 350 MB/s depending upon the controller and the nature of the data transfer.

My average across the first 40% is about 440MB/s (with occasional accesses in the 500MB/s range - just like I said), the next 20% or so is about 400MB/s average and then it drops off after that of course. And this is consistent across ALL my benchmarking tools. I have 6 or 7 of them installed. They can't all be wrong and I'm sure I didn't get "special" drives or anything.

Here are some benchmarks on the same drive that have been reported by several popular sites that look just like the numbers I posted:

BenchmarkReviews using ATTO: 160MB/s

BenchmarkReviews using AS-SSD: 167 MB/s (average)

BenchmarkReviews using CrystalDiskmark: 168MB/s

Tom's Hardware using h2benchw:
Max: 193 MB/s
Ave: 153 MB/s
Low: 93MB/s
and on IOmeter:
177MB/s streaming reads

Anandtech IOmeter average 128KB sequential read: 146MB/s

StorageReview using IOmeter:
Maximum: 210MB/s
Average: 165MB/s

Here is another set of numbers for a PAIR of the Seagates running in Raid 0:

Hardwarecanucks Raid 0: Average read speed with HDTach: 311 MB/s
Very large file (10GB) read: 408 MB/s (on last page)
Very large file (10GB) write: 396 MB/s
Small file (1GB) read: 86 MB/s
Small file (1GB) write: 105 MB/s

which again is dramatically different from your claimed 440 to 500 MB/s and right in line with what everyone else is reporting (155MB/s per drive average, 200 MB/s maximum).

In your MacPro you claim you are getting 230 to 255MB/s sustained reads and writes on individual drives. Can you explain why the drives in your computer can put out sustained read and write numbers that no one else is able to replicate? Maybe the laws of Physics don't apply inside your computer, or maybe you are doing something wrong with interpreting your results, or maybe everyone else is doing something wrong. If your claims are to be believed, then one of these options has to be right. Do you agree?

EDIT: Bifurcator, can you tell us what benchmarks you are using along with your hardware specs (controller, stripe size etc) and testing methodology, and also post screenshots from your tests please?

Feb 18, 2013 at 01:35 PM

WAYCOOL
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p.1 #10 · External hard drive advice for windows vista

I have several of the Seagate drive and have had no problems fast and cheep. If you are a Costco member they often have great deals on them currently the 4tb drive is about $140.00 they are often less expensive than the bare drives. I bought a 3tb drive from them and removed it from the USB3 enclosure and put a different drive in the enclosure awesome deal.

aubsxc, Bifurcator seems to have a pathological need to stretch the truth when it comes to hardware and his inference that the MacPro has a raid chip and is not simple software RAID if farcical at best. Don't expect a response to your benchmark request his results can't replicated and thus statements would be proven untrue. Something along the line of "those are my results take them or leave them" will be the the response so he can go on believing in his outrageous statements.

By the way his statements on usb 2 are strangely correct

Feb 18, 2013 at 07:00 PM

larkinsg
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p.1 #11 · External hard drive advice for windows vista

Try the following Jay:

CalDigit VR2 4TB 1 x USB 3.0 / 2 x Firewire 800 / 1 x Firewire 400 / 1 x eSATA Silver External Hard Drive 820504

Newegg carries it -- use it in RAID 1 and it will be a 2 TB drive to your computer but will actually be 2 identical 2 TB drives with the same data on each to back them up in case one drive fails.

Another option is the Synology line -- it is more sophisticated and will do for a bigger operation. I would go with the following unit: Synology DS413j Diskless System DiskStation. If you get this you will need to buy hard drives for it -- look the drives up for compatibility on the synology web site: http://www.synology.com/support/hd.php?lang=us&bays_id=3&product_id=111

Grover

Feb 28, 2013 at 06:07 AM

15Bit
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p.1 #12 · External hard drive advice for windows vista

Moving a little back to topic - what do you want to use this external drive for? Backups, or as a main working drive?

Feb 28, 2013 at 06:14 AM

Sunny Sra
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p.1 #13 · External hard drive advice for windows vista

Jaybird:
Will you be using USB 3 or 2? The speed does make a difference.

You have several options here for the external drives:
1. buy seagate/wd or any other 2 drive HD enclosure set sold at bestbuy, newegg, amazon etc.
The advantage here is that the hard drives comes preloaded with software that facilitate automatic backups of your files.

Option 2
Buy the hd with large cache and 7200 rpm, buy a case that supports 2 Hard drives in RAID 1 or RAID 0 and put it together.

here are some options for you:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822108120

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822108095

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/WD+-+My+Book+Studio+II+2TB+External+eSATA/FireWire/USB+2.0+Dual-Drive+Hard+Drive+-+Silver/8806857.p?id=1206142173729&skuId=8806857

Feb 28, 2013 at 04:49 PM

Bifurcator
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p.1 #14 · External hard drive advice for windows vista

WAYCOOL wrote:
aubsxc, Bifurcator seems to have a pathological need to stretch the truth

By the way his statements on usb 2 are strangely correct

Feb 28, 2013 at 08:38 PM

aubsxc
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p.1 #15 · External hard drive advice for windows vista

Bifurcator wrote:
WAYCOOL wrote:
aubsxc, Bifurcator seems to have a pathological need to stretch the truth

By the way his statements on usb 2 are strangely correct

So were all my statements. I'm not sure why you can't conduct yourself like an adult. It's a bit disconcerting and even a little embarrassing though no doubt you feel fine being like that - you do it so often I'm sure you're desensitized.

But because I'm being accused of being pathological I'm sure anything I say or screenshot I post will be called into question. Therefor let someone trusted offer their benchmark results instead:

Max Read: 193.6 MB/s
Max Write: 191.5 MB/s
Interface Speed: 410 MB/s

As you can see at those links the drives in question are very close to VelociRaptor speeds and I don't think my claims are much different that what Tom's show there.

This is what you claimed :

They can sustain about 230 to 255 MB/s both read and write

Every benchmark posted in this thread, including the ones you referenced, indicates that these drives cap out at about 200 MB/s at their fastest sectors. You claimed that the drives in your computer are 15 to 28% faster than what everyone else is reporting, and you have been unable to provide any support for these numbers so far. Do you understand why people are skeptical?

Feb 28, 2013 at 09:22 PM

Bifurcator
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p.1 #16 · External hard drive advice for windows vista

I can't help what the software tells me. Others are showing burst rates of over 280MB/s. And if you look around you will see that while most report top speeds around 200MB/s there is difference ratio of 25% on the lower end between test systems. And no, the difference between 200MB/s and the 210 to 240 I claimed is NOT "15 to 28%". How's that math work? Try more like 5% or something... So no, I don't really see why anyone would have any major issues (although in someone's case I can guess

). This isn't the end of the world ya know... it's not like Obama won a second term in office or anything... Oh wait... oops... never mind... go ahead and freak out...

Edited on Feb 28, 2013 at 09:48 PM · View previous versions

Feb 28, 2013 at 09:30 PM

Sunny Sra
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p.1 #17 · External hard drive advice for windows vista

So how is the weather? Its nice and sunny 75 in Southern california. Cheers.

Feb 28, 2013 at 09:32 PM

WAYCOOL
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p.1 #18 · External hard drive advice for windows vista

Hay Sunny nice breeze too. can't beat the weather in So. Cal.

Still no mention of which benchmarks that make 2+2=4.4

aubsxc I told you your request would go unanswered.

Feb 28, 2013 at 10:34 PM

aubsxc
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p.1 #19 · External hard drive advice for windows vista

Bifurcator wrote:
I can't help what the software tells me. Others are showing burst rates of over 280MB/s. And if you look around you will see that while most report top speeds around 200MB/s there is difference ratio of 25% on the lower end between test systems. And no, the difference between 200MB/s and the 210 to 240 I claimed is NOT "15 to 28%". How's that math work? Try more like 5% or something...

You didn't claim 210 to 240. Quoting from your post:

They can sustain about 230 to 255 MB/s both read and write

You also doubled down on this claim in a later post.

Also, you didn't say "burst speed". What you said, again quoting from your original post:

They can sustain about 230 to 255 MB/s both read and write

Words, particularly those used in technology, have specific meanings.

Now lets do the math based on your claimed 230 to 255MB/s, with real world max at 200MB/s

(230-200)/200 = 0.15 or 15%
(255-200)/200 = 0.275 or 28%

Do you get it now?

there is difference ratio of 25% on the lower end between test systems.

Different people use different benchmarks, which run their tests using different methods. Some tests only report average sustained speeds over the entire drive or over representative sectors spread over the drive, and not the maximum speed which is obtained at the outermost sectors. As the screenshot of the HD Tune benchmark I posted shows, the drive averages around 160MB/s for sustained read speeds over he entire disk, about 20% less than the maximum speed, which is about what other people have reported also. No one has reported sustained read speeds in the 230 to 255MB/s range which you claim to be seeing on your machine.

Mar 01, 2013 at 12:58 PM

WAYCOOL
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p.1 #20 · External hard drive advice for windows vista

Dam math and logic now we will never get an intelligent response. I was really hoping to find out the secret to get a ~20% boost in speed. I'm pretty sure Seagate would pay a very large sum of money to implement this magic to everybody. Isolated to one user in Japan this technological advancement dose them no good.

Mar 01, 2013 at 06:44 PM

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