Hexus.net takes a look at three Maxtor and one Freecom external hard disks in their latest roundup!
For a long time, external hard disks were more of a curiosity than something you could realistically add to your PC. If you've been in need of high performance from an external disk or disk array, you've had to spend a fortune on external SCSI, Fibre Channel or some other enterprise-level connection medium. High capacity has gone along with that high price requirement. So for realistic money, in the home or single user price range, you've been stuck with, erm, nothing really.
A couple of things have conspired to change that in recent years. The first is the massive drop in hard disk prices. You can get large capacity and density for very little money, especially when it comes to regular 3.5" form factor disks. The cost per GB ratio is way less than £1/GB now, which means that stuffing loads of capacity into your PC, either internally or externally, won't break the bank.
The advent of FireWire and USB are the second. They are low cost to implement and the bus protocols are flexible enough to attach IDE or SCSI disks to a bridge, since supporting their command set using the bus as a transport is possible without much difficulty at all.
The move in USB spec to USB2.0 and the appearance of FireWire ports on an increasing number of motherboards and laptops, along with low-cost PCI cards that implement each bus, means that the busses are now fast enough and available enough to use successfully with hard disks of a decent speed and size.
External Disk Roundup
For a long time, external hard disks were more of a curiosity than something you could realistically add to your PC. If you've been in need of high performance from an external disk or disk array, you've had to spend a fortune on external SCSI, Fibre Channel or some other enterprise-level connection medium. High capacity has gone along with that high price requirement. So for realistic money, in the home or single user price range, you've been stuck with, erm, nothing really.
A couple of things have conspired to change that in recent years. The first is the massive drop in hard disk prices. You can get large capacity and density for very little money, especially when it comes to regular 3.5" form factor disks. The cost per GB ratio is way less than £1/GB now, which means that stuffing loads of capacity into your PC, either internally or externally, won't break the bank.
The advent of FireWire and USB are the second. They are low cost to implement and the bus protocols are flexible enough to attach IDE or SCSI disks to a bridge, since supporting their command set using the bus as a transport is possible without much difficulty at all.
The move in USB spec to USB2.0 and the appearance of FireWire ports on an increasing number of motherboards and laptops, along with low-cost PCI cards that implement each bus, means that the busses are now fast enough and available enough to use successfully with hard disks of a decent speed and size.
External Disk Roundup
