USB 3.0 Portable Drives. Do They vary Much?

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tdgeek

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#141267 6-Mar-2014 16:01

Are there any brands/types that are better/faster than others?

I am looking at getting two 2TB for backup purposes, preferably not mains powered. I have used Adata before, seem ok , and thoughts on the variability of speed of USB powered and mains powered drives? I may get a 1TB to attach to a new rMBP as a Time Machine/Storage drive

Tks all

Dairyxox

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#1000270 6-Mar-2014 17:00

USB 3.0 specs re: power supplies about ~1 amp, so not so much need to worry about mains powered. You can get quite fast drives. I found toshiba & western digital USB powerd drives to be "good" (at least twice as fast as usb2.0)

LennonNZ

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#1000278 6-Mar-2014 17:09

Yes.. there is quite a difference..

See this about USB 3.0 SSD Drive. I presume the same is with USB 3.0 HDD's

Found one about USB 3.0 HDD's

Batman

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#1000286 6-Mar-2014 17:27

No. They are all 5400rpm. If that's true in theory a higher data density i.e. more TB is a bit faster. In theory all mine write at around 70MBps. If you are lucky you will find 7200rpm ones but with lower data density.

insane

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#1000292 6-Mar-2014 17:53

I had the pleasure of using an ADATA USB 3 drive in USB 2 slots last week. Without doubt the slowest drive I've ever used since USB 2 was released, much slower than USB 2 drives and repeatable across three desktops and two servers.

My WD free agent USB 3.0 on the other hand works great

macuser

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#1000315 6-Mar-2014 18:33

I have a newish WD drive that gets up to 100MBps, my older one transfers at 65Mbps, tho it all depends on file type and size for how fast both run. If it's a huge amount of tiny files they both can't do over 10Mbps (I'm talking 4Kb size).

tdgeek

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#1000350 6-Mar-2014 19:56

Adata Dashdrive HV620 looks good based on reviews

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#1000396 6-Mar-2014 21:18

New drives always work real fast. The heads are free to write anywhere and everywhere as the entire disk is empty.

Because drives are dumb they write bits of files everywhere.

So your disk at 50% capacity does not contain half a portion of used and the other half being empty.

Far from it, there are bits of files all over so the write speed slows down to 60 -70 MBps