Comparison of 6 external hard drives

A device for backing everything up!External drives are needed more then ever before. They are an economical way of regularly backing up your data, storing multimedia content or increasing the storage capacity of a Netbook, for example. The solutions looked at here all have a great advantage: ease of use similar to what you have with a memory stick! You plug in the power cable and connect the device to the computer with one of the data connection cables (USB, eSATA) and things are ready to go with all of the drives being pre-formatted.

Works under PC, MAC and Linux!
These drives don’t require any drivers under Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Mac or Linux. Some of them will only be titled with “Windows and Mac compatible”, but this doesn’t mean they won’t work on other Operating Systems. This means that they will work on these two operating systems as well as your favourite Linux distribution. This isn’t applicable for most of the software provided though.

The eSATA connection is a must
Computers which only have a USB 2.0 port are able to provide transfer speeds of between 20 and 35 MB/s, but this also uses up to 10% of the processor… If your machine has a FireWire 400 or 800 port, then things will speed up by between 8 and 20 MB/s. The ideal connection is eSATA, which reached a record speed of 122.8 MB/s on the Seagate FreeAgent Xtreme, followed by the Memup 3 KWEST Evolution 3.5” and the Buffalo DriveStaton Combo4 while keeping CPU usage to similar levels as FireWire (between 1 and 2 % on average).

Are the prices similar?
For the prices, we saw at the beginning of this article that they range from 120 to $300 for 500 GB to 1.5 TB drive units. This is the price you will have to pay for a drive that is ready to use. The alternative is to buy your own external USB 2.0 or eSATA case, preferably in aluminium, for about $45 and then add a 1 TB SATA drive (32 MB of cache recommended). The prices for the drives is around $140, which will certainly see you saving some money.