[P1] External hard Drive

[Richard J Laue]

>Could someone clarify what better performance means in an external hard
>drive? All I want to do is dump stuff onto it as a backup device. Sort of
>like I did with floppies in the 80's, Zips in the early 90's and CD's up to
>now.



Hi, Brian -

You kind of answered your own question.

Remember how FAST Zips seemed when you first started using them, 
after years of using floppies?  And now they seem like molasses....

Performance means SPEED.  If you've got 20gb of stuff on one drive, 
it's going to take a certain amount of time to copy that to another 
drive.

So, assuming 20gb, would you rather sit around waiting for ten 
minutes, or for 25 minutes?  Because that could be the actual 
real-world difference between an older, non-Oxford firewire drive 
with no buffer, and a newer one with all the bells and whistles.

And, please -- do NOT say, "well, all I'm doing is backing up. I 
don't care how slow it is because I can let it run on its own while I 
go get coffee or something."  That's true enough, and seems sensible 
to someone who has never used an external drive before.  But once you 
START using an external drive -- especially a portable one! -- you'll 
start doing other stuff with it, like carrying it over to a friend's 
house to transfer MP3 files, or bringing it to Kinko's to use their 
laser-printer, or....  well, you get the idea.  And trust me -- in 
ALL these examples, and anything else you can think of, faster is 
better than slower.

One thing I use my pocket-drives for is to save me the need of always 
carrying around my iBook.  If I'm going over to a friend or relative 
or client's house, who has a firewire-capable Mac, I can just plug in 
my hard drive, boot from it, and there's all my stuff, my desktop, my 
programs, my internet settings -- and the client's internal drive 
mounts on my desktop as a separate, discrete device, allowing me to 
do any installation, cleanup, file transfers, etc., that might be 
required.  In other words, my portable drives allow me to carry 
EVERYTHING in my shirt pocket!

My iBook has a 20gb internal drive, and my pocket drives each have 
40gb.  What I do is partition each pocket drive into two partitions. 
One partition is at all times an exact clone (i.e., bootable backup) 
of my iBook's drive.  The other partition is available for whatever I 
want.  Often times, if I'm working on a client's machine, I'll use 
that spare partition to make a temporary backup of the client's stuff 
(assuming he doesn't have his own backup drive) to protect myself in 
case I screw something up on his machine.  This is a good example of 
why speed matters -- the client doesn't want us sitting around 
twiddling thumbs while we wait endlessly for his stuff to copy!

So, when choosing your backup drive, buy the fastest -- and highest 
capacity! -- you can afford.  You will NOT regret it!

Cheers -
RJLaue