I plan to purchase a new usb harddrive and want to use it for portableapps and maybe also portable os.
Therefore it need to be a fast one. How can I find out which usb harddrives are one of the fastest one?
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Are you talking Flash or mechanical? Any needs for capacity?
Most of the benchmarks posted in the forums have been for Flash drives, but the same techniques should work.
MC
Capacity about 250 GB.
And mechanical I think because them are faster then flash. That`s why I talked about usb harddrive, or better harddisk.
USB-powered is also a very nice feature.
-- I've found fairly good performance with WD Passport USB drives. Recently switched from using 12-Gb micro-drive to 250-Gb WD Passport as primary mobile operating PIM environment. P-Apps a critical component for true "road warrier" mobility. (USB micro-drive was getting too flakey and already was approaching half capacity plus working with data on other USB drives.)
-- CAVEAT: care must be exercised to ensure that USB drive is fully disengaged before pulling the USB plug. MS "Safely Remove Hardware" will not always release the USB device. Sometimes the only way to get it released is to shut down or reboot the PC/OS. (Had problem with 160-Gb WD Passport USB drive due to this -- accidentally pulled 160-Gb drive vice 12-Gb microdrive. The action resulted in loss of OS (MS XP) being able to see all the data on the 160-Gb USB drive when plugged in -- possibly due to corruption of primary File Allocation Table. Recovered data copied to 250-Gb drive along with P-Apps & other PIM data from 12-Gb micro-drive.)
-- HD pricing not too bad recently (in range approaching one half U.S. Dollar per G-byte). Not bad having mobile quarter T-byte in package not much larger than pack of playing cards. For protection it slips easily into plastic zipper-lock sandwich bag wrapped inside bubble mailer envelope.
-- USB enclosures are available for plugging in laptop drives (new or used, any size) producing USB drive package same size as WD Passport USB drive.
-- NOTE: with that kind of capacity, usually best to back up only segments of data at a time. Data not changed needs no new back up and rapidly changing data is faster to back up. P-Apps 7zip very handy for this. Needed backup data can be carried along or mailed ahead burned on CD/DVD to handle catastrophic contingencies. (Easy to replace USB drive, not so easy to recover data -- especially when in a pinch.)
---eom
The first thing to do is look at the RPMs and cache size of the drive. The faster it rotates with more cache the "faster" it'll be for you.
If you want a good portable hard drive, look into the Apricorn Bio (I own one and it's sweet).
http://www.apricorn.com/product_detail.php?type=family&id=38
Check NewEgg and Pricegrabber.com for "real" pricing.
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Help control the rugrat population -- have yourself spayed or neutered!
It seems to me the realtime encryption would slow the drive down considerably compared to no encryption. What sort of options do you have with regards to the encryption? Can you turn it off entirely, can you just encrypt part of the drive, etc.
I dunno why you came to encryption. Sure encryption is a nice thing and in fact I encrypt a lot things. But in this thread I was just talking about the fastest drives.
Also I don`t trust much in those bio stuff. TrueCrypt, PGP and cryptsetup have more reviews, aes 256 and I can compile from source.
It's called "killing two birds with one stone". If you want a fast drive with encryption, there you go.
As LOGAN says below, the USB port is the bottleneck most of the time, not the hard drive.
Also, the OP still hasn't clarified if they're talking about mechanical hard drives or something else yet.
Cancer Survivors -- Remember the fight, celebrate the victory!
Help control the rugrat population -- have yourself spayed or neutered!
Yeah he did, a few minutes before that post.
MC
>>Also, the OP still hasn't clarified if they're talking about mechanical hard drives or something else yet.
I have done that already!
Yes, but I load all the new pages when I come here and then read them so I may not have seen it...especially since your post was only 16 minutes before mine (as mentioned in the post above).
Cancer Survivors -- Remember the fight, celebrate the victory!
Help control the rugrat population -- have yourself spayed or neutered!
Harddrives are most likely to have a higher transfer rate than the USB Port. So when talking about USB hard disks don't expect higher transfer rates than USB allows;
USB 1.1 max 12Mb/sec
USB 2.0 max 480Mb/sec
(That's Mega-bits per second if you were wondering)
I bought myself a external casing to connect a standard HDD to USB port. Very nice
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I have not done any benchmarks, but im pretty sure you can speed up any flash drive in windows by opening:
My Computer > Rightclick flash drive > Properties > Hardware (Tab) > (Select flash drive + click Properties) > Policies (Tab) > Optimize for Performance (check this)
Warning: This feature works with portableapps, but I have not fully tested anything. This feature will enable write caching in Windows for the flash drive. I dont notice any increase in speed, but I have not tested this feature in slower machines. I would be interested to see the results (dont have the time right now/lazy).
Hope this helped someone.
-MDP
It turns on WRITE caching, which means that apps that do a lot of writes to the drive should be significantly more responsive, since they will no longer need to wait for the write to complete before they can carry on operating.
However, that means that even after you've closed down all your apps, there could, and probably will be data that hasn't been written back to the drive, and, if the PC is at all busy, it could be quite some time before it does naturally finish.
What this means is that if you enable this option, you absolutely MUST cleanly shut down the drive using the Safely Remove Hardware feature to eject it before unplugging it. If you don't do so, sooner or later, you will corrupt the drive, and you will say goodbye to some or all of your data.
Good Call!
(That's an absolute MUST with write caching on)
Cancer Survivors -- Remember the fight, celebrate the victory!
Help control the rugrat population -- have yourself spayed or neutered!
FYI, a summary of the various mode difference...
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbstick_e.html
Scroll down to the "Removable or What" section.
I should have mentioned the importance of safely shutting down you flash drive; it is essential.