Will an external harddrive work well with P2P applications???

[egrooker]

HI, I've recently downloaded Direct Connect....and ofcourse I need to share more files!!....but I'm constantly moving from computer to computer....so having a huge Internal Harddrive really isn't ideal... Does anybody know how an External Harddrive (USB 2)would work? I heard it's not as fast as an Internal Hard Drive so I was wondering if it would be convenient for others downloading from it. How would it work with non Direct Connect apps like Kazzaa?

[DigitalJunkie]

I've DSL connection. So I set my Download folder on my Internal Drive & my Upload folder on USB 2.0 External Drive, it is working well for me!

[ston]

USB 2.0 is fast. About as fast as the average internal IDE hard drive. This is because the limiting factor right now is not the connection's bandwidth but the speed of the hard drive itself. USB 2.0 has a maximum possible throughput of 480 Megabits/second (60 MegaBytes/sec) Most ATA 100/133 hard drives only achieve around 20-40 MBytes/sec sustained transfer rate. So you should not even notice much of a speed difference between USB 2.0 and Internal hard drives. But now don't even consider USB 1.1 drives! They only do 12 Mbits/sec.


If you already have an extra internal hard drive, you can buy an adapter kit to convert it to USB 2 for under $100 US. Basically a USB 2 hard drive is just a (IDE) ATA 100/133 drive with protective case, an external power supply and a USB 2 adapter and cable.

I recommend getting a 5400 rpm instead of 7200 rpm drive. 5400 is not only less money and higher maximum capacity, but is quieter, runs cooler, and probably more durable, and the speed difference is not noticable.

The only thing that you can't do with an external hard drive is boot the computer from it. (yet) You can even install and run applications from it, but this may not a good idea because when the external drive is unplugged the computer may not even boot up properly if the app loads TSR's. So removable drives are generally best just for file storage. However, if you want to be able to start a download on one computer and continue on another, installing the P2P app on the external drive might work better if you are having trouble continuing partial downloads on another computer.


Short answer is YES, get a USB 2 hard drive. You won't be sorry.

[ston]

I forgot to mention one important thing.

Only the latest high end new computers being sold today come with USB2 ports built in, otherwise you will have to install a pci card or for a notebook, a pcmcia adapter to make your computer USB 2 compliant.

A USB 2.0 drive will run on a computer with only USB 1.0/1.1 ports, but then it runs only at usb 1 transfer speeds of 12 Mbit/s. However, this is still many times faster than a broadband connection, so USB 1 should not slow down uploads at all.

Downloading several big full-CD size files at a time to a 2.0 drive on a 1.0 computer might slow it down a lot. This is because some p2p apps like eDonkey2000 write the entire 700 MB file to the disk every interval of 10 minutes or whatever. So I would think that when running it at USB 1.0 speeds and downloading large files, you would almost definitely want to have your download folder on your internal hard drive.

[notbob]

i used external usb (1.1) drives for uploading etc.--the only time it'll affect you is if you have a t1 conn that is maxing out on upload--my 768/128 dsl worked just fine with it

i also used firewire boxes, faster to load up with stuff, but as for uploads it made no difference

what i had was a hdd loaded up with my share in which the files were loaded onto the drive internally, then put into the usb box later--as i said, this worked out very well