External Hard Drive Advice

"I've noticed that hammering the USB interface can eat some cpu but firewire seems to require little."

Could be right there, I remember (vaguely) something about the way they both work and firewire was designed as being more independent of the cpu.

If the machine is struggling on disk space there is every chance that it will have both a low powered processor and USB1 only. Either that or you have rather more "educational material" than most.

If that is the case it would make sense to at least look at firewire - I've noticed that hammering the USB interface can eat some cpu but firewire seems to require little. Obviously this probably depends on the actual drivers in use.

I've only used firewire for video capture from a digital camcorder so I'm not sure what it's like for external disks but I do know that using one through usb1 on a 600 celeron sucks.

"if you don't use usb2 or firewire it is slooow"

If you're planning to upgrade your machine anyway then getting a USB2 drive, as most are these days, even if you can't use it fully at the moment you're not going to lose out.

My only recommendation would be buying an external drive/caddy which allows you (or looks like it allows you, i.e. you can take it apart easily) to upgrade the hard-disk inside.

I currently have external drive for my notebook and although it doesn't mention upgrading in the docs it's very easy to take apart and like most simply has a USB/Firewire to IDE card inside so you can do what you want (a bit of future proofing if you like).

On the same subject by the way there's been a few interesting articles of late about how some USB2/Firewire drives can be faster than internal given the constraints of PCI etc and the availability now of 2.5" 7200/16MB buffered drives.

if you don't use usb2 or firewire it is slooow.
If its a desktop it is so cheap to get an additional drive I'd do that in preference. If you need to replace the main one use norton ghost to copy across.

Gents,

I've been thinking for a while about getting an external harddrive. My machine works wel in all respects, but it struggles for disk space. I don't want a new internal hard drive because I'm likely to get a new machine next year - so I think an external hard drive for storing middle to low access data is a good idea.

So any recommendations or even horror stories?

Cheers,
Mike