[X4U] Why does anybody ever get a USB external hard drive?

[John F. Richardson]

Hello,

My answer. Price is the main reason.

Assumption: an external hard drive is an internal hard drive in a case with
various ports.

Consider the following. I walk into an Apple store and see Lacie and Western
Digital drives in various configurations. This happened recently (Drive 2, 3
and 4). Drive 1 is obsolete except for dirt cheap drives.

Drive 1: USB 2
Drive 2: USB 2, FW400
Drive 3: USB 2, FW400, FW800
Drive 4: USB 2, FW400, FW800, eSata

So, the box specs indicate eSata > FW800 > FW400 > USB 2 [oops, maybe USB 2
is close to FW400...I forget]. But assume the above is true.

Question 1: What internal drive mechanism is in all of the drives?

If the answer is a standard IDE drive mechanism, then I claim that USB 2 is
just as good as any other. You just pay more to have the ports included.
Before eSata, I suspect that this was true. But that could be in the past.
Today is the future.

Definition: native transfer rates = transfer rate from magnetic storage
media sectors to the port.

So, if drive 4 really has an internal storage mechanism that has native
transfer rates that match the eSata specs, then Drive 4 is the best.

But what about Drives 1, 2 and 3? Do they have an internal mechanism with
native transfer rates in the eSata range? Then it is price. Is the discount
worth it?

If drives 1, 2 and 3 have an internal mechanism with native transfer rates
from the storage (seek, latency, cache, etc.,...) to the port (USB2,
FW400/800) then

YES.....there is no reason to have a USB 2 drive except price and you get
what you pay for.

So, is there any way to verify the native transfer rates? I have been
assuming that all FW drives just have a bridge chipset that converts IDE
mechanism data streams to use USB/FW protocols. I believe that the vast
majority of original consumer FW drives, even in 2005 or 2006 had IDE disks
inside a case with a bridge chip. I hope I'm wrong. Please list at least the
LaCie native rates for FW drives in 2005-2008 time frame. I have asked this
question (in various forms) several times over the last two years and never
received an answer even for just one brand name. What are the drives that
actually pump data at FW800 speeds? Any URL's?

FW was extremely useful for video transfer from camera / high speed device
to high performance SCSI or "native FW class" hard disks.

John F. Richardson