That's weird. Well let's put it this way.

Are you going to store small files up to 200mb per file? Seeking time would be more important then pick 7400RPM with USB2.

If you are going to transfer and store 1GB+ files... take USB3. It requires little seek time but better transfer rate.

What I would do?

Grab the USB3 and swap in an SSD.

 

Well it does depend on a couple of factors, basically it mainly boils down to the quality of the external drive itself. I have seen some external USB 2.0 drives have a write speed of around 30MBps (which is amazing), while I have seen many others which have around 10-15MBps.

With that in mind an internal 5400RPM drive will have more than a 30MBps write speed, so your bottleneck would probably be limited to USB 2.0. So I would say go for the USB 3.0 Drive.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by djriful

That's weird. Well let's put it this way.

Are you going to store small files up to 200mb per file? Seeking time would be more important then pick 7400RPM with USB2.

If you are going to transfer and store 1GB+ files... take USB3. It requires little seek time but better transfer rate.

What I would do?

Grab the USB3 and swap in an SSD.

I do have some smaller files, but most files are easily around or over a gig in size.

Heh USB 3 and an SSD would be the ultimate combo, but that would defeat the purpose of having fast and cheap storage

 

well no HDD will satuarate USB 3.0 yet
a 7200RPM HDD would be bottlenecked by USB 2.0 as its speed is upto 60MBps and its likely the drive could satuarte that..
for storage a 5400RPM drive is fine as with network storage for example there is not much difference in 5400 and 7200 drives well in NAS systems.. not sure about how a 5400RPM drive handles streaming 1080p tho but it wont bottle neck USB 2,0 let alone 3.0

 

Id grab the USB 3 drive, far more bandwidth.

You can easily hit the max speeds of the usb 3 HDD, but the usb 2 hdd will be limited to ~25-30MB/s in real life use

 

Go USB 3.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sean Webster

Id grab the USB 3 drive, far more bandwidth.
You can easily hit the max speeds of the usb 3 HDD, but the usb 2 hdd will be limited to ~25-30MB/s in real life use

Would playback of 1080p HD videos suffer from the 5400 RPM? Or would only seeking be affected? (Relative to a 7400 RPM)

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by mingqi53

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sean Webster

Id grab the USB 3 drive, far more bandwidth.
You can easily hit the max speeds of the usb 3 HDD, but the usb 2 hdd will be limited to ~25-30MB/s in real life use

Would playback of 1080p HD videos suffer from the 5400 RPM? Or would only seeking be affected? (Relative to a 7400 RPM)

I have a few 5400rpm spinpoint f4 2TB drives and they run multiple 1080P steams fine b/w my father and I. Seek speeds on them are only very slightly slower than my F3s.

 

You'd really need to tell us what the specific drives are.

Without knowing that, I would generally say USB 3.0 given the relatively low bandwidth of USB 2.0. But there are a ton of other things to consider like brand, quality, actual spec's for transfer speeds and seek times.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by guyladouche

You'd really need to tell us what the specific drives are.
Without knowing that, I would generally say USB 3.0 given the relatively low bandwidth of USB 2.0. But there are a ton of other things to consider like brand, quality, actual spec's for transfer speeds and seek times.

Well I don't have any specific ones in mind, I'm just trying to a list of options so when something goes on sale I can decide whether or not it's worth getting

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by djriful

That's weird. Well let's put it this way.

Are you going to store small files up to 200mb per file? Seeking time would be more important then pick 7400RPM with USB2.

If you are going to transfer and store 1GB+ files... take USB3. It requires little seek time but better transfer rate.

What I would do?

Grab the USB3 and swap in an SSD.

Err... 200MB is huge. "Small files" would be stuff under 512KB.

Google used a 4MB read/write size on their filesystem - but I gather they used to run 4-drive RAID 0+1. (maybe they still do) That means 2MB reads/writes per drive is the level that they chose for optimal performance. Later they apparently reduced it to 1MB to improve responsiveness of their services. Clearly they feel drives can handle that much seeking while maintaining high performance levels.

In this case, either option is fine, because even 50mbit Blu-Ray rips only consume about 6MB/sec, which is well within USB2's speeds. But that said, I'd go for the USB3 external. I'd rather have the high transfer speeds when doing large file copies. That's the reason I got a USB3 flashdrive.
Quote:

Originally Posted by fofamit

Well it does depend on a couple of factors, basically it mainly boils down to the quality of the external drive itself. I have seen some external USB 2.0 drives have a write speed of around 30MBps (which is amazing), while I have seen many others which have around 10-15MBps.

With that in mind an internal 5400RPM drive will have more than a 30MBps write speed, so your bottleneck would probably be limited to USB 2.0. So I would say go for the USB 3.0 Drive.

My Hitachi 2TB had read/write speeds of 34MB/sec.

But I still liberated it from its enclosure. Now it's my Steam games drive... sequential maxes at 155MB/sec.

Quote:

Originally Posted by mingqi53

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sean Webster

Id grab the USB 3 drive, far more bandwidth.
You can easily hit the max speeds of the usb 3 HDD, but the usb 2 hdd will be limited to ~25-30MB/s in real life use

Would playback of 1080p HD videos suffer from the 5400 RPM? Or would only seeking be affected? (Relative to a 7400 RPM)

Only seeking would be affected. It might take 10ms longer.

Keep in mind that low RPM drives are the ideal medium for video. That's why most security camera and surveillance devices use AV-GP drives. Low RPM, very little error correction - they just keep dumping data onto the platters at a stable rate.
Quote:

Originally Posted by Sean Webster

I have a few 5400rpm spinpoint f4 2TB drives and they run multiple 1080P steams fine b/w my father and I. Seek speeds on them are only very slightly slower than my F3s.

I played 15 video streams simultaneously off a ReadyNAS NV+ (usually caps out around 20-25MB/sec, very close to USB2's limit) - I have no idea how many 1080p streams I could play, but I think in my case my videocard (GTS 250) was holding me back - not my drives.

 

USB 2.0 will bottleneck even a 5400rpm drive and is the bottleneck in any system you choose. The drive speed won't matter in the case of using USB so you'd get faster speeds through the 5400rpm usb 3.0 drive over the faster drive that will be heavily limited by usb period. Also, Access speeds are a limitation of the hdd itself and has nothing to do with the bandwidth of the connection so USB 2.0 or 3.0 won't make a difference in that respect. Remember that in real world situations, USB 2.0 will rarely exceed 30Mb/s if you're only transferring large sequential files such as a large blu-ray movie. It'll be closer to 10Mb/s for many small files. I've reached over 100Mb/s on usb 3.0 on my green drive (~5400rpm) so that'd definitely be what I'd recommend 100%.