Saturday, June 28, 2008

Slow USB Drive

Hmm. I just copied a 700MB AVI file (Hitman, the movie) from my notebook HDD to both an external 250GB HDD via USB and a Sandisk Cruzer 4GB USB drive. To my surprise, the USB drive was much slower. I didn't time each file transfer but it was about 4x slower to copy to the USB drive vs. the external HDD. I wonder if the solid-state drives now being offered in computers are any faster than a fast HDD.

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I just checked and the external PC drive is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA drive. Wow, I guess the 7200RPM drives are fast. Too bad the internal drives in my Mac mini and VAIO are 5400RPM drives.

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I also checked the other external drive attached to my Mac and it's also a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 drive but twice the capacity at 500GB. I got lucky on both purchases since neither one listed what was inside when I bought them; could have been stuck with slower 5400RPM or 4200RPM drives.

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