Need a fast external hard drive...
retiretomaui
Posts: 392
[Need a fast external hard drive...]...To store Daz content. I store my content in a 1 TB external HD as my regular laptop's regular HD was becoming overfilled with Daz content. However, a spinning HD is also slllooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww. I man really sluggish. Is there a faster alternative for a reasonable price out there of at least 1TB in size? My budget would be a few hundred dollars. Sometimes, it takes many seconds for DAX to access all of the content, making working in DAZ often a study in waiting. Granted, anything external will likely mean a slight lag time, but I'd prefer to reduce that as much as possible.
Many thanks,
Bob
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Comments
Best option is to make your own with an external USB adapter and SATA SSD hard drive. That will eliminate the spinup time of the platters in a normal SATA drive and improve transfer times.
Regardless of how fast of a hard drive or SSD you get, its not going to transfer any faster then the USB ports its going through. If your laptop only has USB 2.0 ports, then the data cannot transfer any faster than USB 2.0 speeds. WHile you could get a 1TB SSD for a few hunder dollars, the only real advantage would be access speed. Instead of waiting for it to spin it would be almost instant, though limited to the transfer speed of the port its going through.
If your laptop has a card reader (Micro SD, etc). this can be a good option for stashing some of your less used content without having to mess with cables, etc.. Just make sure to buy one of the faster media/sd/xd cards if access times is an issue for you. I do NOT recommend using a card reader for anything that involves a lot of reading/writing operations, just for storage of your less used stuff. Just make sure to back up your sd card data every so often on a more reliable drive at some point (like say on a large external HDD).
Depending on how tech savvy you are, and how unfearful you are of voiding warranties by doing the work yourself, replacing your main laptop HDD with an SSD is definitely a useful upgrade. I did that to my HP 2 in 1 laptop, and boot/response times dropped dramatcally (it had a 5400 rpm drive before). Plus, SSDs are more power friendly than hdds, which can help increase the number of hours you have between recharges..
If you do this, buy an external HDD enclosure and cable so that you can easily clone your old drive over to the new one. Afterwords, you can still use/access your old laptop HDD utilizing the same enclosure.
Around 500 gigs sems to be the sweet spot pricing wise for SSD's, although looking at Newegg I'm seeing some sub-$300 options in the 1tb range.
HDD's are pretty cheap these days, and you can often find 4+ tb in the $100 or so range, even an external one.
If money is no object SSD wise...
4tb Samsung 850 EVO, in the $1.5 grand range at Newegg
As pointed out above, your main limitation on external drive access speeds will be your USB port speed (or Thunderbolt if you have one of those ports).
I have used an external SSD on USB 3.0 and it is much faster than the typical external or internal HD on sata or usb 3.0 or not. It is not father than an SSD on Sata though or on an m.2 port and so on. Even if you only have usb 2.0 it's still faster and you have to consider the SSD will be even faster when you upgrade to a new desktop or laptop, but I'd be very picky about laptops.