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USB Hard Drive Recommendations? 25

Posted by Cliff from the technology-that-works-for-you dept.
Argon asks: "I need a external drive to transfer bulk data between home and office. I already use a CD-RW for backup, so this drive is going to be used -only- for shuttling data. After investigating various solutions (Zip, Orb, CD-RW etc), I finally decided that a USB hard drive seems to be the best solution all around. I found two good solutions (and believe me this information is hard to find), one by Fantom Drives, and the other by Lacie. However, there is very little information on the web about these drives - reliability, using on Linux etc. For example I can't even figure out if the Fantom drives come with an internal power supply. The Lacie drives seem very nice, they come with a built in power supply and look rugged. (Can't USB devices take power from the system instead of a separate power supply?). Does any slashdotter have experience with these drives - comparisons, recommendations?"
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USB Hard Drive Recommendations? More

USB Hard Drive Recommendations?

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  • I use their network hard-drives for data transfer. I'm not sure what you're looking for really, in that i don't know how much you want to transfer. I like the network hard drive cause it's cheap (about $14 a gig), and it's big (40 to 360 gig models). Again, you seem to want a more "plug it in-transfer my data-pull it out" solution, but the setup for the network version is simple, but obviously requires a network at home and at work. I must admit that i'm very happy with the maxtor solution, as hubs are dirt-cheap, and i can expand as i need to. They also have other external storge solutions, but i haven't checked them out. Both are advertised on their main page, so go check it out, and good luck :0)

  • I have a USB Hard drive. (Score:3)

    by Kris_J ( 10111 ) on Tuesday October 24, 2000 @03:32PM (#678603) Homepage Journal
    I bought a USB-2-IDE adapter box from (I think) Nasa Technology [nasa.com.au], put a removable IDE drive tray in it and mounted a 20Gig drive in the tray. Works well, but needs drivers, Windows 98 and above only. Performance isn't too great -- it's slow and it slows down the system when you're accessing it. However, you can hot-swap, just switch the box off and swap the drive no need to reboot.

    I recommend finding a way to get a Firewire drive running with your system. If I could find a Firewire 10/100 ethernet adapter I'd switch to Firewire, but I only have one PCMCIA slot in my Ultralight.

  • Buy SCSI, 10x speed, 10x+ storage, save money ... (Score:5)

    by BitMan ( 15055 ) on Tuesday October 24, 2000 @03:38PM (#678604)

    Okay dude, I know this sounds weird but SCSI would not only be faster, but probably cheaper. Most SCSI drives (of even two generations back) can do easily 10MBps+ (80Mbps+), whereas even USB's fastest speed, we're talking only 1.5MBps (12Mbps). And don't even think of those IDE to parallel kits, 2MBps (16Mbps) max (most don't get get 1MBps/8Mbps). Plus SCSI support under Linux is easy (and even loadable on the fly!).

    Cards, case and cabling should run you under $100 for two systems. The a good sized, but older model, SCSI drive should only be another $30-100 for a decent size (2-23GB) and speed (5400-7200rpm, 512-2048KB buffer). The breakdown:

    • Cards ($20/each) -- (2) SCSI cards at about $20 a piece thanx to the TekRam-315U (UltraSCSI, no-BIOS) [tekram.com]. You can find them at your favorite PriceWatch advertising reseller [pricewatch.com]. You'll need more if you have more than a few systems to swap between. Of course this becomes cost prohibitive if its more than 5 systems, so consider that. But for just 2-4 systems, it's great (and, again, fast)!
    • Case ($20) -- You can usually find them at various on-line resellers for $20 or so. Here's a great 2-bay w/40W PS for $19 [compgeeks.com], and that's new. If you want smaller, there are various resellers with single bay SCSI enclosures too. Cyberguys has a 3.5" for $50 [cyberguys.com], although you might find cheaper if you look a bit. The case should come with internal cabling (I've never seen one without).
    • External Cabling ($10) -- Cabling is also an addition, but fairly cheap anymore. Assuming you set the drive jumper for termination, you only need the cable. You can get the SCSI-2 HD50M to Centronics 50M for $9 [cyberguys.com] for cases with Centronics connectors, or SCSI-2 HD50M to HD50M for $10 [cyberguys.com] for cases with SCSI-2 HD connectors -- both at Cyberguys. If you really want to not terminate the drive itself, but on the case, HD50M active terminators are $11 [cyberguys.com] and Centronics passive terminators are $5 [cyberguys.com]
    • Hard Disk ($30+) -- Depending on what model you get, older SCSI hard drives can be had for $30-100. If you want massive or fast, $200-300 will get you give a bit of each. Some resellers that carry new, unused, used and refurbished hard drives:

    Drives that are 50-pin narrow (Fast, Ultra, Ultra2, etc...) and will work in the case without modification. Some with be 68-pin wide or 80-pin SCA (FastWide, UltraWide, Ultra2Wide/Ultra80, Ultra160). In the case of the two later, Cyberguys sells converters to 50-pin narrow for nearly all of these connectors. The only caveat you'll have is termination, either terminate on the drive itself (i.e. don't use an external terminator) or tell the drive to use 8-bit SCSI (instead of 16-bit in 68/80-pin) as any external terminator for 50-pin will only terminate the lower 8-bits (some drives will autosense the connection as narrow and will autoterminate anyway -- see the drive docs).

    Again, the only reason not to go with this config is if you are going to be sharing with more than just a few systems. You're going to be lugging around a drive anyway, why not forget worrying about carrying the media as well and have 50x the storage (compared to Zip -- much more manageable).

    If you absolutely need removable and have the money to burn look at SCSI Jaz instead (2GB capacity, ~5MBps/40Mbps performance). But don't go optical, e.g. 5.2/9.4GB DVD-RAM, it's slow (9x CD, 1x DVD = 1.35MBps/10.5Mbps).

    -- Bryan "TheBS" Smith

  • USB power (Score:3)

    by cperciva ( 102828 ) on Tuesday October 24, 2000 @03:55PM (#678605) Homepage
    While power can be supplied via the USB cable, it is limited to 100mA (low-power devices) or 500mA (high-power devices). Thus, the maximum power delivered is 2.5W -- far less than the 10-25 W which a typical hard drive uses.
  • There is this cute little USB memory drive that's not much bigger than a big USB plug.

    It's called the Trek ThumbDrive, here is a review from last July:

    http://www.techtv.com/freshgear/firstlook/story/ 0,3679,2601806,00.html

    Here is their homepage:

    http://www.usbmedia.com/

    Capacity : 16/32/64/128MB

    Transfering more than 128MB at USB speeds is pretty damn slow... so I question the point of buying a USB harddrive.

    But if you must, you could buy a new Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox MP3 player. It runs on AA batteries, and besides being a portable USB harddrive, it's a dandy MP3 jukebox! It's $432 on Pricewatch.

    Plus it's designed as a consumer electronics device, meant to be carried around and run off batteries, so I suspect it will last much longer than a kludged up IDE to USB converter box.

  • I prefer the removable drive bay myself, because you can also use the available bay to boot test operating systems via lilo simply by addressing the appropriate partition on the 2nd drive.

    If you go to removable drive bays, you can get them cheap from www.tigerdirect.com [tigerdirect.com] for about $14.99 each without fans (with keys) and 3 fan models (without key) for about $22.99 (there are discounts in higher quantities 3-5 or 6 or more tiers)

    You may also find the external usb/paralell and firewire kits there as well.

    They send out almost weekly catalogs (the size of a magazine) for free if you sign up for one at the website.

    (not important to this line) They are selling one of those robot lawn mowers in there for $794.99, i though those things were going to be thousands of dollars.. ill get one if i can one day.

    DRACO-

  • If you're gonna be transferring a few gigs of data, expect to sit around for an hour or two while you wait for your data to transfer over the snail-like USB bus. Then expect to wait a couple hours when you get home to transfer the data onto your home machines. Not exactly fun.

    I used to shuttle data with an old 1GB SCSI drive, which took a few minutes to fill. Other people mentioned removeable IDE drives, too. If you don't mind rebooting, you can look into this too. (Though not recommended, I've had no problem "hot-swapping" SCSI drives.)

    - A.P.

    --
    * CmdrTaco is an idiot.

  • I remember a discussion here on Slashdot a while ago about SmartDisk [smartdisk.com]. Somebody was asking if there were any Linux drivers being developed for SmartDisk's amazing disk adapters [smartdisk.com] that allow you to use your existing 1.44MB floppy drive to read/write 2MB - 128MB flash memory modules (the answer was a resounding "yes"). Neat huh?

    Anyway, I quickly discovered that the folks at SmartMedia make a bunch of other cool products too, such as ultra-portable USB hard disks [vsttech.com] (ignore the fact they only mention Macintosh systems in the summaries - the details state they can be used on PCs too). The 4 GB disks are about $180, 6 GB disks are $20 more. If USB is too slow for you, and you have the capacity, they also offer FireWire versions [vsttech.com] (you probably will need a Mac for these). And finally, if you can't make up your mind, they offer 3 GB - 30 GB versions that support both USB and FireWire environments.

    I can't offer any experience with these disks, but I really want to try one out! Maybe someone can post their experience with SmartDisk products? Failing that, you could always get one of these drives and then do us a favor by submitting a review to Slashdot or something. :)
  • I do the same with a digital camera & 64MB media card - That way I can take files back and forth to work. Once in a while, I take home my 13GB SCSI with a USB adapter and dump in a new load of MP3s and VCDs to use while I work.
    Since I have a sony vaio, I only have one PCMCIA slot, so if I'm on the network, I have to use USB to attach the big drive. Performance is slow, but OK for single-users hitting the drive over the network.
    Copying gigabytes of files over the USB each morning is intolerably slow, so I use the SCSI cable instead, or just burn a CD if it is just MP3's... I copy the MP3s to my workstation or my laptop and then give away the CD...
    I should really look into one of those USB network adapters - That would free up the PCMCIA for the drive...

    Cheers,
    Jim in Tokyo
  • get a firewire pci card and drive, it's hella faster than usb and you can also do neat video stuff with it (if you have that type of cam)

  • Personally, I've been using Buslink's [buslink.com] 20 GB USB Hard drive for the past 6 months.
    Bought it in Comp USA for about $300, it's running closer to $200 now.
    Haven't had any problems with it under Win98, just download the drivers from the web page and go.
    Haven't had the time to look into Linux support for it, but if someone wants to slap me upside the head with info on it, I wouldn't argue. :)
    ---
    Your mouse has moved.
    Windows NT needs to be restarted
    for this change to take effect.

  • Yes, I agree that removable IDE works too. Bays and trays are $15-25 at Cyberguys [cyberguys.com].

    Just realize that you'll have some master/slave issues if you have devices on both IDE channels, or your IDE devices have different jumpers between single/master (e.g., WD drives).

    That's why I like SCSI. Although an additional PCI IDE card in each would also be a good option -- but then we're back upto the cost of my SCSI solution.

    -- Bryan "TheBS" Smith

  • If you are talking about Snap Servers, I would strongly advise against it. We have a 120 gig version that managed to completely corrupt itself and finally kick 2 of the 4 drives out of the array. Their tech support were morons and they couldn't ship my advance replacement for a week. To top it off, they also charged my credit card for the security deposit even though I sent the broken product back within 30 days.
  • I'm blown away by how fast PCMCIA compact flash interfaces are, faster than your local harddrive! And it's so painless, just plug it in, no drivers, every recent OS supports it. The USB flash readers are so sad in comparison.

    I see all this talk of hot swap with SCSI. I've never seen this work well with a PC (how do you deal with termination?). Are you rebooting each time you plug/unplug? Or are you using the SCSI only for this one device?

    Isn't firewire a serialized SCSI protocol? Why not go with firewire? The cables are cheaper and longer (PriceWatch says $12 for 10 feet, $18 for 15feet), adapters are cheaper (PriceWatch says under $40). And firewire is designed to handle hotswap. I don't know about Linux support, but the latest WinXX and Win2000 have built in support, and all the recent Macs have it built in. It's over 30x the speed of USB.

    It's sad that USB has ended up as our only common "fast connect". Why aren't we all using 100BT Ethernet? It's so fast, cheap and common! Is simple TCP/IP that hard to do on these little devices? Granted it's not firewire, but by definition it's networkable! The adapters are borderline free, and the cables are as cheap as phone wire (it's even common to make your own cables, try that with firewire).

  • I've been using a LaCie USB hard drive for about a year with no problems.

    One thing to keep in mind is the speed of USB. If you're just shuttling around a few small files, it's no big deal. If you need to take home several GB every day, look elsewhere; you're now looking at hours of transfer time.

    As an offline backup solution (ie plug in, dump working files for safekeeping, unplug) it's not bad, and it's why I bought the drive. You should weigh file-size against your patience, though, before purchasing. ;)

  • USB drives are painful to use: s - l - o - w.

    The benefits - USB is on lots of platforms, almost all OS's that support USB support USB drives (abstraction is a good thing) and USB is idiot-proof & non-complex.

    On the other hand...

    SCSI drives are FAST.

    The negatives are that SCSI drives can cost a bit more, SCSI cabling & termination can become a black art requiring sacrifices (standard chicken/goat/virgin progression applies) and it's slightly complex the first time out. On the plus side every OS supports SCSI, it's (again) much faster then USB and it's a much more common thing to do / better supported / better documented.

    Look, I know speed isn't everything but USB is like using an old tape drive. It was meant as a low-speed universal serial bus for things like keyboards & mice. Supporting scanners, webcams & speakers pushes it to it's maximum, running a HD off of it is doable but oh-so-painful. Since FireWire/1394/iLink (USB's high-speed cousin) drives still command an exotique-tech surcharge they're probably out of your market so go with the older spec for this stuff: SCSI.

    BitMan listed a good set of resources and a better set of baselines to work from. With those you can get up & running quickly & correctly.

  • no...what i'm talking about is a fairly new product..the smaller ones (40-80 gig) are the size of one of those dsl routers...pretty reliable so far

  • How I'd transfer lots of data (Score:3)

    by Mignon ( 34109 ) <satan@programmer.net> on Wednesday October 25, 2000 @06:50AM (#678619)
    I have an old (486DX2-66) laptop with a relatively new, several gig hard drive. I've got an ethernet card for it and a hub at home, so it would be ideal for transferring lots of data. No termination or power-down issues. If you poke around ebay, I'll bet you could find a similar laptop for around $200. The drive would cost you more than that. You can probably get a PCMCIA ethernet adapter for around $40 or so. Another advantage is that you then have a laptop. One disadvantage compared to just a drive would be the size.
  • Don't let this solution pass you up. It's very easy to disconnect an ide power and data cable from a cheap, small, durable ata100 hard disk, and hook it up to any computer you want. Ultimate comptability, price/performance, and very easy to use. Don't be afraid to take off that case!
  • Most floppy adapters in PC's are not capable of anything faster than 0.5Mbps, although some (usually only ones advertised as tape accelerators) are capable of 1.0Mbps. Either way, that is SLOW.
  • Computer Geeks Outlet -- good personal experiences

    Have you ever tried returning things to them? Prior to now my experiences with compgeeks had been good, but my most recent purchase (a 19" monitor) arrived DOA. It's been a real hassle trying to get it exchanged. Over a month later I've finally gotten an RMA number and gotten it returned, but still don't know when they're going to send me a refund or replacement.

    Overall, I'd say that their prices are good and their selection is interesting but their service leaves much to be desired.
    ________________
    They're - They are
    Their - Belonging to them

  • Don't get me wrong, I agree absolutely on the fact that SCSI is the way to go. But parallel is not slower than USB!!! In theory, both have a max bandwidth of 12 Mbit. According to USB standards, any USB device can use up to 50% max bandwidth, resulting in 6 Mbit max, while parallel can use the full 12 Mbit. The fact that certain companies write crappy drivers that are incapable of reaching this bandwidth does not change that. The only benefits of USB over parallel is the hot-plugging capability and the fact that you can hook up a whole lotta woma^H^H^H^Hdevices on one IRQ. Firewire is the way to go. SCSI speeds (Firewire=SCSI3), hot plugging, etc.
  • Why would a floppy adapter need to be any faster than 1.0Mbps if that's about all a floppy is going to hold?
  • Antec [antec-inc.com] makes a hot-puggable SCSI drive tray [antec-inc.com]. Has front panel LCD for monitoring, alarms, etc. They also make an IDE tray that's not hot-plug. I have the IDE one, and I'm impressed with the quality. Has front-panel lights, lock, cooling fan; heavily built.

  • Hi, I agree that FireWire would be better or even SCSI. I prefer USB because speed is not an issue; all I really need is plug the drive in, copy the data and take it home. It's nice if the copy takes 2 minutes but not a big deal if it takes 20 minutes. I may not be able to add a external SCSI/FireWire adapters to one of these boxes.

    I don't see anybody commenting on the Fantom drives. They seem to be relatively cheap 13G for under $200. Any body using them under Linux? I saw a thread in the linux-usb mailing list that somebody got one of the Lacie drives working under Linux.

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