Your opinion on these 3 external HDDs

[Multicore]

Western Digital My Book Essential External Hard Disk 3TB USB 3.0

Seagate Backup Plus Desktop Drive 3 TB USB 3.0

Seagate GoFlex Desk External Drive 3 TB USB 3.0


Two questions also:
Is Seagate selling the last stocks of GoFlex Desk External Drive, since i had to search it out ?
Will these 3 TB drives work with Win XP ?

 

[Sean W.]

my criteria for a external hdd is:

usb 3.0
7200 rpm

as long as it meets those i just look for the cheapest one in the size that im looking for. i have a WD 3tb, ive had it for a few years, never had a problem. have all the critical stuff backed up on another 1tb drive.


they should work on xp no problem. i assume you are running xp on an old school rig, that doesnt support usb 3.0... but i would still get a 3.0 drive because when you get a new rig that does support usb 3.0, youll be all set.

 

[Multicore]

Thanks for the reply Sean.
I would be purchasing the drive in Thailand - most probably WD

The Seagate external drives come with an external adapter - one can buy a thunderbolt adapter (when they go mainstream) & get mind boggling speed from older drives also. The same may be possible for WD external drives, but only after crack opening the casing (which i do not like to be) & plugging the SATA ports directly into the Seagate adapter.
http://www.techist.com/forums/members/sean-w-/

 

[PP Mguire]

You aren't going to get mind boggling speeds out of a HDD. The Thunderbolt bus has a lot of bandwidth but standard HDDs don't even cap a SATA2 bus which is slower than USB 3.

 

[Multicore]

You aren't going to get mind boggling speeds out of a HDD. The Thunderbolt bus has a lot of bandwidth but standard HDDs don't even cap a SATA2 bus which is slower than USB 3.

Thanks PP, for possibly correcting me, but you need to give more stuff to read & understand your point.

if i understand correctly, you are saying that, if i buy a 3TB SATA III EHDD, i will not get 500-600 MB/s ( actually 477-572 MiB/s ) while transferring say a 4GB file to my computer (1TB SATA III HDD) via Thunderbolt (assuming both HDDs are >50% empty & defragmented)

I am assuming that you have a point (i read your explanation & the stuff to read about the micro-stuttering of Radeon7xxx Vs. Nvidia660Ti) - but i just need to know/read more about it.

ps.
I didn't had time to explain that by mind boggling speed i meant 500-600 MB/s, since i was getting late for the trip. BTW, Seagate 3TB is unavailable & WD 3TB is available at ฿4500 from WD retail store & at ฿4460 from J.I.B (a computer parts seller WD collaborated with) at Panthip Plaza, Bangkok.

Theoretical speeds only (not common in practical cases):
SATA 3 (SATA-600) - 6000 Mbit/s or 600 MB/s
USB 3.0 ---------- 5 Gbit/s or 625 MB/s
Thunderbolt ------ 10 Gbit/s × 2 or 1,250 MB/s × 2

( 1 Gbit/s = 1,000,000,000 bit/s )
( 1 Mbit/s = 1,000,000 bit/s )
( 1 MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s )

 

[PP Mguire]

This is going to come off as rude, but bear with me because I haven't had my morning coffee yet. I already explained why but I'll go into detail.

Pretty much all consumer mechanical HDDs cap out around 150MB/s burst speed, and settle between 80MB-120MB/s sustained file transfer speed no matter the brand or model. This is why I say, they don't even cap the SATA2 bus bandwidth which has a theoretical limit of 300MB/s. This is why SSDs are so popular because they are the only devices capable of sustaining well over 300MB/s on file transfer. As you can see, not even close to SATA3, USB3, or Thunderbolt theoretical bandwidth limits. In other words, a USB2 casing is barely capping the actual limits of a mechanical HDD speed.

Also for more clarification USB3 is getting updated soon to be 10Gb/s. Which is 1280 MB/s and 5Gb/s is 640MB/s.

 

[Multicore]

understood; researched a little on tomsharware & now feel enlightened
it's good to know the details
regards

ps.
the visit to tomsharware also made it clear that Seagate Barracuda (3TB, 7200rpm) performs well in most of the tests.