new external usb or esata?

[supermasterpig]

I am going to buy a new external hard drive should I buy a 2 tb usb or a 1 tb esata? Will the esata be that much faster the drive slot on my dell studio 17 is an esata power usb. I am hopefully going to be buying one by tom. thanks!

 

[pparks1]

On my Dell E6400, my eSATA drive runs at about 95MB/sec...while my USB 2.0 runs around 25MB/sec

I bought one of these;Newegg.com - Thermaltake BlacX ST0005U External Hard Drive SATA Enclosure Docking Station 2.5” & 3.5” USB 2.0 & eSATA

it's $25 after rebate and can use both eSATA and USB. You simply provide the hard drive. It works very well. I've got one at work and at home.

 

[supermasterpig]

Well I would just get an enclosure but I have a credit towards walmart for product replacement. Would it be better to get an enclosure and hdd or just a regular external and you show that your esata is faster so Ill probably look into that. Although I soon plan to hook it up to my network when I get my own place (hopefully).

 

[pparks1]

eSATA is always faster than USB 2.0. It's about 3x-4x the speed.

 

[supermasterpig]

Would my esata/ power usb combo drive work just as fast? would it speed up the usb?

 

[pparks1]

The USB 2.0 interface is limited to 480Mbps. However, there is a fair amount of overhead with USB 2.0...so about 320Mbps is about as fast as you will ever see on an empty bus. This comes out to about 40MB/sec. However, anybody that has worked with USB 2.0 will tell you that it's going to realistic max out around 30MB/sec in the real world.

 

[supermasterpig]

So the esata / power usb slot is a full esata slot? None of my friends have esata so i havnt tested it to see if it fully runs as fast as a regular esata slot.