How fast are external USB Hard Drives?

Basically I've used Flash Drives (memory sticks) before and they are fast enough with one big file but really slow with loads of little ones, it's quick to compress the files into a big zip before sending to them.

So anyway, I was thinking about getting an external USB harddrive for backups but was worried about crappy transfer rate (Typically I may backup 10GB). I have a modern PC so it's USB2.0.

Any info? Thanks :-)

I bought a Western Digital MyBook. I had to format it to NTFS.

I am quite pleased with it. I'm finding it almost as fast as copying/moving a file on the internal hd (to itself).

Intitially, the drive did seem slow - took ages to format. Once formatted and up and running in NTFS it has been a nippy number.

I just tested my 100GB WD in its USB2 external enclosure

These are copying a folder containing 4 files 1.4gb total

C = Windows system partition
I - External HD

drive C to drive C took 1 minute and 3 seconds
drive C to drive I took 55 seconds
drive I to drive C took 57 seconds

Which in my mind isn't bad at all really.

That's my experience too. The maximum speed, with large files, is about 24MB/sec.

But it is much slower when moving many small files.

AS long as its USB2.0 its very acceptable.

I have a USB 2.0 drive and it's totally useable. I wouldn't develop off of it but for storing files and data, it's great.

Are these drives fast enough to capture digital video? Would I be aple to capture MiniDV video directly to one of these?

Maybe, if it were being captured in a compressed format.

I had an 80gig USB HD and I think it was running off a USB 1.0 port on an old iBook, and was still seemingly quite reasonable to use - a `little` slow but generally ok. I used to do all my blitzmax stuff off of it, till the lightning hit.

that's what I feared.

But sounds OK for big files.

Can anyone do a test for lots of little files please?

There's no need to test - lots of small files are a nightmare!! I zip everything and copy across...unless I really have time on my hands. Zips work like lightning.

OK. Problem these days is getting a decent commend line zip program for free. Found one and used it at my accountants, I'll have to look it up today...

I'd recommend Firewire (800) for external drives; it's more reliable and from my own experience I can tell that even Firewire 400 performs better than USB 2.0 (which in theory should be faster at 480 Mbps). Good external cases have both ports anyway.

@Grey Alien: Maybe you will find something in the "GNU Unix Utilities for Win32" at http://unxutils.sourceforge.net. If you want something free with a GUI, Filzip is your friend: www.filzip.de (it's a .de domain, but it's multilingual).

It might be slower copying little files but is it really worth going through the bother of zipping them up, copying the ZIP, and unzipping them? I mean, can't you just do something else while the files copy? :)

copying small files just isn't that slow. It's slower yes but not like your going to wait ages.

I just did a quick test BTW. 900mb of images

6408 files

C - C took 1m 43 seconds
C - I took 1m 14 seconds
I - C took 1m 46 seconds

So not bad at all really :)

Winni: Thanks for the info.

Warren: I recently got a free zip program and wrote a batch file for my accountants as transferring to flash drive was too slow for tons of small files, but looking at Evak's figures (Thanks Evak btw) that doesn't seem to bad for external drives, so yeah I probably won't need to. Wooo :-)

this has been a good topic for me as well. ive been wanting to shift over to my laptop as my main PC but have been unwilling do so until i get fast external storage. ive been doing research and Winni's comment about FireWire is deadon. if every PC you will be connecting to already has FireWire, definately go FireWire 400 as it beats USB 2.0 every time. FireWire 800 is really rockin. there are also many enclosures that are both USB and FireWire so you can get the best of both worlds. they even make really cool FireWire storage towers where you can put up to 4 HD/DVD drives. now i just need to find money (and convince the wife).

:)

BTW my above figures were with a 480 mbps and its not much slower than the internal ATA133 IDE HD.

I'd go with USB since its universal and backwards compatible with USB 1. So best for portability between multiple systems compared to firewire which isn't widely supported.

As I only use my external usb drive for storage and playing back mp3's, I'm not too concerned about speed. It's the extra storage and flexibility gain which is the most important to me. usb is fast enough, imho