External portable drives and external desktop drives

[Che Castro]

I want to buy a 2tb external drive , the wd portable is $130
The regular non portable version is $99

My question is how fast is the non portable version compare to the portable drive?

Lets say I want to transfer 150gb in to the drive, if the external desktop drive takes an hour , how long would the portable take ?

http://www.amazon.com/Passport-Port...359561162&sr=8-3&keywords=external+hard+drive

http://www.amazon.com/Book-External...59561162&sr=8-15&keywords=external+hard+drive


If the difference in speed is not huge , I'm going with the portable version

But I would like to know

Thanks

 

[HazyCloud]

There's a lot of things to consider with these. First off, do you have USB 3? If not, you're only going to get USB 2.0 speeds on both devices. Second, Amazon doesn't list what RPM these drives are so we don't even know if they are the same. Are you using this on a Mac? If so, you may want to look at a Thunderbolt or a Firewire drive to achieve faster speeds.

I'd guess both will be the same. If I had to choose and portability didn't matter, I'd go with the My Book. FWIW, I have a My Book for Mac that uses Firewire 800 that houses my iTunes library and it works just fine.

tl;dr There's not enough info to know which will be faster.

 

[marzer]

I want to buy a 2tb external drive , the wd portable is $130
The regular non portable version is $99

My question is how fast is the non portable version compare to the portable drive?

Lets say I want to transfer 150gb in to the drive, if the external desktop drive takes an hour , how long would the portable take ?

http://www.amazon.com/Passport-Port...359561162&sr=8-3&keywords=external+hard+drive

http://www.amazon.com/Book-External...59561162&sr=8-15&keywords=external+hard+drive


If the difference in speed is not huge , I'm going with the portable version

But I would like to know

Thanks

The difference will be negligable, esp. with a USB 2 interface. I have a couple external FW800 portable drives (5400rpm) and two external FW800 destop drives (7200rpm). All the drives test at roughly the same speed.

 

[Che Castro]

So if you have a Mac mini usb3 is better to get an external drive that is FireWire ?

Will that also work in a WD HD media player ?

 

[marzer]

So if you have a Mac mini usb3 is better to get an external drive that is FireWire ?

Will that also work in a WD HD media player ?

If you have any computer with usb3, using a usb3 drive provides improved throughput over firewire.

Keep in mind even the best performing mechanical hard drives under real world use top out around 120MBps. Average hard drives will max out at less than that. My iMac tests around 105MBps from a 7200rpm Seagate drive. My external FW800 drives consistantly perform around 70Mbps. To really exploit usb3 throughput for external storage you need to go SSD.

 

[g4cube]

If you have any computer with usb3, using a usb3 drive provides improved throughput over firewire.

Keep in mind even the best performing mechanical hard drives under real world use top out around 120MBps. Average hard drives will max out at less than that. My iMac tests around 105MBps from a 7200rpm Seagate drive. My external FW800 drives consistently perform around 70Mbps. To really exploit usb3 throughput for external storage you need to go SSD.

I have LaCie d2 3TB External that has both a Thunderbolt and a USB 3.0 interface in the same drive. I'm seeing average 170MB/sec using the Black Magic Design benchmark on either interface. each run of the test fluctuates a few MB/sec, sometimes dipping to 160MB/sec. Best I saw was 185 MB/sec after a fresh reboot of my i7 Macbook Pro retina.

The d2 has a 7200RPM Seagate drive inside. I understand LaCie i using Seagate for all 3.5" drives now, since they are now part of Seagate. There are 3TB and 4TB models available.

 

[Che Castro]

Ok I decided to get the non portable version

When I get the drive do I need to format the drive to HFS? So that it can read/write
Mac mini 2012

 

[Sossity]

Ok I decided to get the non portable version

When I get the drive do I need to format the drive to HFS? So that it can read/write
Mac mini 2012

Yes, you will if it is formatted to NTFS, you can use disk utility to do this.

 

[Che Castro]

I currently have a 1tb external drive that's full , I was using it with my windows pc NTFS
how can I make this work on the Mac without deleting the files on it [format]

 

[g4cube]

The LaCie drives come preformatted as mac OS Extended, which is the official name for HFS+

The Mac OS X will be able to read your NTFS formatted drives without any special effort. It is read-only access.

If you wish to reformat or repartition a drive, simply review the Apple Help for Apple Disk Utility. This is the application used to reformat ad repartition external and internal drives.

Reformatting and repartitioning will erase any information already on te drive.