The limitation is the speed of 5400 RPM drives. Neither FW nor eSATA in common laptop (2.5” enclosures) supply power, so you have to carry extra cables (power or USB) to power the thing, and you end up using a USB port as well.
Unless you want to run VMs off this thing, just stick to USB 2.0 – it’s fine for copying typical office docs on/off and means you need just the one cable. And buying spare cables is easy and cheap. Cheers Ken From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com] On Behalf Of mike smith Sent: Thursday, 4 March 2010 11:57 AM To: ozDotNet Subject: Re: [OT] External hard drives On 4 March 2010 12:49, Greg Keogh <g...@mira.net<mailto:g...@mira.net>> wrote: My wife needs an external hard drive for backing-up and carrying around her couple of hundred MB of work files. I’ve never owned an ext HDD or looked at them, so before I drive down to the local MSY (parts list<http://www.msy.com.au/Parts/PARTS.pdf>) to get one, I’d like to check first if there are any recommendations or traps to be aware of. Friends have ext HDDs with USB connections, but I suppose they are outdated now as our new office desktop machines have SATA plugholes on the back ... is that right? USB has never been in vogue for hard-drives - firewire or esata.
