External hard disks - Performance hit?

[mimp]

Ok, thinking of hiding my hard disk somewhere out of the way by means of an external USB2 enclosure. What sort of performance am i likely to get? i think USB's bandwidth is up to it from what i remember, so I doubt moving big files about will be a problem, I'm just not sure what it'll do to acces times and the like.

Thinking of running my OS from it but not sure if this is just a silly idea.

Whilst i'm on the subject, does anyone do enclosures that take SATA drives or am i limiting myself to the older parallel variety?

And whilst i'm thinking out loud, how long can sata cables get before they refuse to work? is that a viable alternative?

 

[mr_fishbulb]

Just out of interest, why don't you want your hard drive in the case?

 

[Phnom_Penh]

Why not just get external sata?

 

[clive r]

SATA has a limit of about 1m

USB has a 5m limit, after which it needs a boost from a hub or repeater. You can do that 5 times (25m) before the signal dies.

I have a couple of USB drives for backup and they seem quite quick.

I'd keep the OS local.

Also look out for NAS devices coming on the market.

 

[Phnom_Penh]

Its probably better to go for a NAS device as Clive r says, although a windows/linux box would also do the job. Also as he says , keep the OS, and the pagefile local would be a good idea.

 

[FragTek]

I just hooked up a 300gb IDE drive via USB2 enclosure not so long ago... The performance is on par with what I had expected for a storage drive.

Here's how it stacks up to my SATA RAID drives:

Maxtor 300gb 16mb Cache IDE via USB2:

2 x 74gb SATA Raptors RAID 0:

 

[Eguy]

haha those raptors rape

 

[mimp]

Thanks for all the replies, just trying to digest them now..

Just out of interest, why don't you want your hard drive in the case?

I use the computer mostly for audio/recording work so want everything as quiet as humanly possible. The hard disk is currently the loudest thing in my computer by quite a margin, so if i could stick it outside the room i'd be a much happier bunny.

My original plan was to stick the OS on a small 5400rpm notebook HDD as they're pretty much silent, and have a larger disk attatched via usb for storage. Just replaced my motherboard and noticed a 'boot form usb hdd' option, so was wondering if i could do away with the notebook hdd altogether. From the look of those graphs it'd be significantly slower doing it that way tho.

looked at NAS but not in a great deal of detail, do have gigabit LAN on my computer so i guess it's a possibility if going the other route - at least cable lengths wont be an issue then and i could hide it in the cellar or something.

Why not just get external sata?

The cable length thing - want to have the hard disk outside the room so need about 4m to play with.

Looking at some notebook reviews on storagereview.com and the transfer rates for a 5400rpm drive are between 20-40Mb/s so looks like it might actually be a pretty close run thing.

Not sure how the seek times compare as the graphs on that site split it into seek time + rotational latency (who knows) whereas yours gives one figure..

 

[mimp]

Why not just get external sata?

The cable length thing - want to have the hard disk outside the room so need about 4m to play with.

 

[mimp]

Looking at some notebook reviews on storagereview.com and the transfer rates for a 5400rpm drive are between 20-40Mb/s so looks like it might actually be a pretty close run thing.

Not sure how the seek times compare as the graphs on that site split it into seek time + rotational latency (who knows) whereas yours gives one figure..

 

[FragTek]

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[mimp]

oops, sorry - i'm new here

noted for future.

 

[Phnom_Penh]

Its probably best not to go for a USB or Sata, and get a System such as a linux or windows box then network it. If you networked it to you main pc using gigabit networking, and then had the drive sata'd in the box with a decent amount of memory and cpu speed, you could get a very high speed of transfer.