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External 2.5" Hard Drive Advice

post #1 of 6
12/5/07 at 5:56pm
Thread Starter 
Hey guys,
I have several external drives and I'm trying to help a buddy get an external laptop drive.

We're looking for small form factor so I was leaning towards a 2.5" laptop drive in an external enclosure. I've found the laptop drives to be a little more forgiving in moving around and what not. It seems that most of the drives I'm finding are SATA and most of the SATA enclosures that I'm finding are USB2 and eSATA; rather than USB & FW. I can only seem to find enclosures for USB & FW that are for IDE drives.

One purpose of the drive was to install XP Pro and throw a few games on there to see if we could create an external, bootable gaming drive for his Macbook Pro. I was a little concerned with trying to game over USB versus Firewire, with FW being better at streaming data rates.

So I was looking at the Seagate Momentus 100gb 7200 rpm drive which is a SATA interface and I was trying to find an enclosure for it. I didn't find a single 2.5" SATA enclosure with USB and Firewire on Newegg. I doubt he'll use the eSATA since he'd have to spend money on an eSATA Expresscard. So then he's stuck using USB for a bootable gaming drive.

So what am I missing here? Should I just get an IDE drive instead of the SATA and then get a USB/FW enclosure to make sure he gets the data transfer benefits of FW?

Thanks for the help!!
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post #2 of 6
12/5/07 at 11:46pm
If you want to boot from an external drive at top speeds you'll want a FW800 enclosure and ideally, IMO, an eSATA enclosure and eSATA expresscard adapter. Not sure which ones (expresscard) allow for booting via bootcamp, though the FW800 would allow for it on a stock MBP system. eSATA is the fastest access route for external drives whether in single drive or RAID configurations. You could do FW800 for Windows and games, but eSATA would, again, be recommended. if you want high speed gaming (load times), then you'd opt for a 3.5" eSATA enclosure.

<shock!> everything can't be found at newegg???!!! Noooooooo!!!! <universe implodes>

i found this neat search engine that when you enter in search queries like "2.5 enclosure firewire 800 esata usb" you find all kinds of neat stuff

sorry, couldn't resist.
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post #3 of 6
12/6/07 at 1:49am
To tell the truth Tria, out of a standard 2.5" drive you certainly won't top out a FW800 bus, even on a 3.5" drive you won't really. That is why RAID arrays in FW800 enclosures are so common for video and audio work.

eSATA is the fastest certainly, but you are still talking RAID arrays to take advantage of it.

Seablade
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post #4 of 6
12/6/07 at 5:52am
somewhat old but there tends to be a difference even on a single 3.5" drive, though newer FW800 chipsets might make up the difference.

http://www.barefeats.com/hard48.html
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post #5 of 6
12/6/07 at 11:41am
There is a slight difference on a 3.5" drive, but not much of one, and really not enough of one that most people would notice unless streaming LOTS of data to and from the HD (eg Audio and Video as mentioned before). For gaming I doubt it would make to much of a difference to be honest, while it is disk intensive, it is not nearly as disk intensive as doing audio or video editing on a large scale.

Seablade
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post #6 of 6
12/9/07 at 12:54am
Thread Starter 
Thanks for the insight guys; and yes Triadone i searched elsewhere, I mentioned Newegg as an example of what I was finding. Thanks for the search link though. That is a pretty sweet little enclosure that comes up. I'll be looking more into it. Thanks guys.
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