External Hare

[chan2004]

Hi guys,

just bough a new macbook
gr8 piece of macine

i am planning to buy an external hard disk
i have two options
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=398

and

http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/index.asp?Cat=8
essential edition

which one to go for?
will the transfer rate be slower as hard disk size increases?
is there any drawbacks to these or things i should consider before purchasing the drive?

yours truly
totally field

 

[chan2004]

thread topic accidently typed like that
so, ignore the thread topic and pay attention to the thread content

 

[mrwizardno2]

Size doesn't exactly equate to decrease in speed. You want to check a few things:

Rotational speed: higher is usually bettter, though some newer drives are capable of besting their higher speed (7200) cousins at a meager 5400 RPM. Check reviews on Newegg and elsewhere.

Platters: Fewer usually means faster. This is because of the higher density of data on each platter. Again, you can find this by searching newegg, or by looking it up on manufacturer sites, elsewhere, etc.

Interface: Firewire 800 / eSata seems to be the way to go if you're looking for speed / available bandwidth, with USB being slower than those two.


What are you considering doing with the drive? Is it just for storage / backup / etc? If so, USB would be fine - most drives will all be comparable to eachother, I wouldn't spend too much time dwelling on their speed.

The thing I'd look at are reviews, buy drives that get good reviews, and lots of them - not ones with 3 5 star reviews, that's a severely limited pool of experience.

 

[remmy]

I don't know about the WD elements but I've got a old mybook and I don't quite like it. It's noisy and the software is not great.

 

[chan2004]

Size doesn't exactly equate to decrease in speed. You want to check a few things:

Platters: Fewer usually means faster. This is because of the higher density of data on each platter. Again, you can find this by searching newegg, or by looking it up on manufacturer sites, elsewhere, etc.

Interface: Firewire 800 / eSata seems to be the way to go if you're looking for speed / available bandwidth, with USB being slower than those two.


What are you considering doing with the drive? Is it just for storage / backup / etc? If so, USB would be fine - most drives will all be comparable to eachother, I wouldn't spend too much time dwelling on their speed.

QUOTE]


in the webpages, they are not mentioning anything abt platters?
does it have any other name?

also, i believe in macbook, we can only use external hard disk through USB
am i correct?