[OT] Does a multi-drive USB external hard disk rack exist?

[Liam Proven]

On 5 September 2010 19:03, ms <devicerandom at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 05/09/10 13:38, Liam Proven wrote:
>> On 5 September 2010 01:37, ms<devicerandom at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> Wonderful, thank you!
>>> I don't have an esata port on my laptop, but I've seen there are usb
>>> converters, so I guess it's not a big problem -or it is?
>>
>> No, as far as I know, you can't convert USB2 to eSATA.
>
> Google disagrees:
> http://www.google.co.uk/products?hl=en&q=usb+esata+adapter&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=99mDTPreCNS5jAe0mqSbCQ&sa=X&oi=product_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CCwQrQQwAA

I sit corrected. Actually, I do own an external USB hard disk adaptor
with a SATA port, so it is possible; it's just that the performance is
poor.

>> It would be a
>> foolish thing to do - USB2 maxes out at a *theoretical* 480Mb/s
>> whereas eSATA, like SATA, runs at 1.5Gb/s - more than 3X faster - for
>> the slow version, 3Gb/s for most modern disks and interfaces and 6Gb/s
>> is coming.
>
> I am perfectly aware of that but I don't need raw speed, I just need
> storage. I live happily with USB external drives. It's not foolish at
> all, if you can't plug eSATA but you can plug USB.

[Shrug] Your mileage clearly varies. I wouldn't spend money on such a
thing; it would seem to me to be an egregious waste of cash to buy
lots of storage that you can't access at more than a quarter of its
full speed.

> Thanks a lot for the advice. It seems I haven't both of them (it's an
> Asus Eee 1201n), unfortunately.

Ah. That is *not* a laptop; it is a netbook. They're not the same
thing, although the lines are becoming blurred.

Personally, I would be very reluctant to buy anything much with an
Atom chip in it - they're sluggish, crippled little things. My
notebook cost me £200 new (OK, refurbished), is only slightly bigger
than a netbook and dramatically more powerful. It's an IBM Thinkpad
X31 from www.sterlingxs.co.uk.

If you have the money to consider some fairly serious storage such as
you're asking about, you might also consider replacing your netbook
with an actual notebook PC with high-speed storage interfaces (e.g.
Firewire) and an expansion slot or two. Just a thought.


-- 
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