Victor, Thanks for all of the information. I greatly appreciate all of the good advice. You covered several points I wondered about. I will keep your words of wisdom handy. What is your opinion of www.newegg.com? Do you have another site that would prove to be better? I live in the United States.
Thanks for your time and information! ----- Original Message ----- From: "Victor Gouveia" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, January 05, 2008 10:31 PM Subject: Re: [Blind-Computing] external hard drives > Hi Tammy, > > I am also in the market for an external drive, and have found some things > you should look out for when shopping for these monsters. > > First is to look at what kind of interface it has. > > USB is the common one, but some models will also come equipped with a > Firewire cable, and even some will come with an RJ45 jack, which means it > can be connected to the network and used as a network drive. > > Secondly, you'll want to look at the rotation speeds of the disk, > sometimes > measured in RPM's. The standard is 7200 rpm's. Anything below that is > tantamount to very slow access. > > Thirdly, and I think this is most important, is the read/write speeds and > the transfer speeds, usually measured in megabytes per second. > > There is really no standard for this, and some retailers will sometimes > try > to fool you into thinking that the higher the transfer speed, the faster > you'll get data on the drive. While this can sometimes be true, the fact > is > that the read and write speed is more important than the transfer speed, > as > the transfer will have to wait while the data is being read or written. > > The transfer speed may be referring to the transfer rate of the cable or > connection, and not necessarily the drive itself. One drive I found was > boasting a transfer speed of 480 mbps, but the read/write speed was > abyssmally slow. > > An example I can cite is a electronics' chain here in Toronto called > Future > Shop. > > They were selling a 500 Gb external hard drive for 99 dollars. Once I saw > that, my mouth fell open, as I couldn't believe the price, until I saw the > read and write speeds, about 27 and 25 mbps, reading and writing, > respectively. > > While this seems high, try to remember that the mbps stands for megabits > per > second, not to be confused with megabytes per second, as most people > commonly see it as. > > What shocked me was the fact that it still said an rpm of 7200, which > should > not support that kind of read write speed, but then I realized what might > be > slowing the read write speeds up, and that leads me into the last point I > want to make. > > Circuitry... > > You can have the most expensive hard drive in there, but if the enclosure > stinks to high heaven, then that really expensive drive means absolutely > nothing. > > The circuitry must come with a cache of some kind, and some kind of power > switch, as this will control how long the hard drive lasts. Continuously > keeping the drive on will shorten the lifespan of the drive. Although it > has not been proven to shorten it's lifespan dramatically, it does shorten > it nonetheless. > > So this is what I think you should look out for, and I hope this helps in > some way. > > Victor > > > Visit the JAWS Users List home page at: > http://www.jaws-users.com > Address for the list archives: > http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ > To post to this group, send email to > [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For help from Mailman with your account Put the word help in the subject > or body of a blank message to: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Use the following form in order to contact the management team > http://www.jaws-users.com/BlindComputing.php > If you wish to join the JAWS Users List send a blank email to the > following address: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] Visit the JAWS Users List home page at: http://www.jaws-users.com Address for the list archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help from Mailman with your account Put the word help in the subject or body of a blank message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Use the following form in order to contact the management team http://www.jaws-users.com/BlindComputing.php If you wish to join the JAWS Users List send a blank email to the following address: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
