Looking for a Good External HD

geneo said:

Not much on the cache. Yes on the rotational speed.

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With the purpose of what the drive is going to be used for does that really make a difference or would it only help when uploading files? Just asking out of curiosity.

Winuser said:

Getting close to being half way to the 6TBs.

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lol yep. I don't download things like that often though. This is just what I have downloaded over the past 10 years or so.

JAM83 said:

Maxtor Drives, i believe were the best PATA drives out there, like you said. .

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Maxtor PATA drives were considered junk as they were known as Maxtor Colorado which was known as MiniScribe before. Maxtor SCSI were considered good as those are from Maxtor San Jose. Western Digital and Maxtor I believe called it EIDE while Seagate and Conner Peripherals called it FastATA, they were the same technnology just under two different names depending the manufacturer. There was also Quantum and then ofcourse IBM/Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. With Seagate, not all Seagates are the same as it depends where that product line came from originally as the 7200rpm, 10,000rpm 15,000rpm in the different product lines, those were all products that came from Control Data Corporation(CDC)/Imprimus acquisition along with their technologies for example which is not used in the other cheaper product lines.

Speaking about external drives like the ones that Seagate or Western Digital has such as the My Passport line, other than the storage capacity, how do you even find what the RPM and cache size of the drive inside is? When looking at specs, the interface speed doesn't really define the performance because you will have a transfer rate that is cached and then you will have a sustained transfer rate which is more important as unless that data is on the cache, you will never exceed the sustained transfer rate.

Maybe can tell with Crystaldiskinfo the RPM speed of the WD My Passport drive, truthfully i haven't checked that yet though, but i will in a moment for one of my Passport drives here

Checks mine right now at least 1 of the drives if i find the cable to connect it to Desktop lol really quick here




(Disconnected when not in use)

bikemanI7 said:

Maybe can tell with Crystaldiskinfo the RPM speed of the WD My Passport drive, truthfully i haven't checked that yet though, but i will in a moment for one of my Passport drives here

Checks mine right now at least 1 of the drives if i find the cable to connect it to Desktop lol really quick here




(Disconnected when not in use)

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That would only be possible after you already had the drive in your possession but what I meant was for someone who was shopping for a external disk drive and trying to find the important specs to decide what to buy. If you already had the drive in your possession, you can easily open the enclosure to get the model number off the internal drive to be 100% certain or you can query it using software to look at the spec sheet for that bare drive as well as read reviews to see what the performance and other things as tested are.

The actual specs for a WD20NMVW are:
Capacity 2TB
Speed 5400 RPM
Cache 8 MB
Size 2.5-inch

Almighty1 said:

That would only be possible after you already had the drive in your possession but what I meant was for someone who was shopping for a external disk drive and trying to find the important specs to decide what to buy. If you already had the drive in your possession, you can easily open the enclosure to get the model number off the internal drive to look at the spec sheet for that bare drive as well as read reviews to see what the performance and other things as tested are.

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Ohh that is very true, not sure how would find the specs before purchase though--didn't think of that aspect

bikemanI7 said:

Ohh that is very true, not sure how would find the specs before purchase though--didn't think of that aspect

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That was why I asked since it seems like the manufacturers don't tell you much more than the capacity of the drive and the external interface type compared to what's available when buying a internal drive.

Almighty1 said:

Maxtor PATA drives were considered junk as they were known as Maxtor Colorado which was known as MiniScribe before. Maxtor SCSI were considered good as those are from Maxtor San Jose. Western Digital and Maxtor I believe called it EIDE while Seagate and Conner Peripherals called it FastATA, they were the same technnology just under two different names depending the manufacturer. There was also Quantum and then ofcourse IBM/Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. With Seagate, not all Seagates are the same as it depends where that product line came from originally as the 7200rpm, 10,000rpm 15,000rpm in the different product lines, those were all products that came from Control Data Corporation(CDC)/Imprimus acquisition along with their technologies for example which is not used in the other cheaper product lines.

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I don't know why you think Maxtor was so bad. I never read that about them. Maxtor was was the third largest hard disk drive manufacturer in the world before being purchased by Seagate in 2006.

I bought my first hard drive in maybe 1985. It was 50MB. I bought many hard drives over the years since then. Unfortunately, I didn't keep records for them or the computers they were in. I only have records for the ones I bought since about 2000.

IDE/PATA hard drives I currently have records for:
Fujitsu 1 (good 1)
Maxtor 9 (good 1; caution 4; failed 4)
WDC 7 (good 1; failed 6)

My only Maxtor drive still showing good is a Maxtor Ultra Series 250GB. Tesing showing it to actually to be a Maxtor MaXLine Plus II Model 7Y250P0. The MaXLine was considered to be a higher end longer endurance series. I suspect this drive was relegated to Ultra when it did not pass some test for the MaxLine.

MisterEd said:

I don't know why you think Maxtor was so bad. I never read that about them. Maxtor was was the third largest hard disk drive manufacturer in the world before being purchased by Seagate in 2006.

I bought my first hard drive in maybe 1985. It was 50MB. I bought many hard drives over the years since then. Unfortunately, I didn't keep records for them or the computers they were in. I only have records for the ones I bought since about 2000.

IDE/PATA hard drives I currently have records for:
Fujitsu 1 (good 1)
Maxtor 9 (good 1; caution 4; failed 4)
WDC 7 (good 1; failed 6)

My only Maxtor drive still showing good is a Maxtor Ultra Series 250GB. Tesing showing it to actually to be a Maxtor MaXLine Plus II Model 7Y250P0. The MaXLine was considered to be a higher end longer endurance series. I suspect this drive was relegated to Ultra when it did not pass some test for the MaxLine.

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I had many hard drives over the years and Maxtors do fail since I have every box still for every drive that got replaced by the manufacturer. I guess it is what you compare it to. It has nothing to do with how big they are but in 1985, Seagate and MiniScribe made MFM and RLL drives. MiniScribe eventually got bought out by Maxtor San Jose became the Maxtor division that made the IDE drives which is why it was labeled as Maxtor Colorado as that was where they were based. The original Maxtor which only made SCSI drives which had a way higher quality than the Maxtor Colorado side. There was also a company called Storage Dimensions which was basically a division of Maxtor San Jose and a external drive. The high failure rates are in the 2.5" drives which originally had IBM which later became Hitachi from the 14.1GB 5400RPM to the 60GB 7200RPM drives, Fujitsu even though they ran at 5400RPM and ofcourse Seagate with their 100GB 5400RPM drives as both Seagate and Western Digital entered the 2.5" market in the late 2000's. Western Digital 500GB 2.5" drives appears to be reliable. You had to be active on either UseNet newsgroups in the 1980s or 1990s to know what was good or not. Western Digital for 3.5" drives including their Caviar line back then for maybe 200MB were considered reliable but just slowed compared to the competition. There was also ESDI and other drives so a lot depends on what types of drives you have used to know how it really compares. My Windows XP machine from the early 2000s which I need for WinFax Pro is still 24x7x365 on a Western Digital 250GB drive from that time and still works now.

So it's not me thinking Maxtor IDE drives were bad but rather, that was what a majority of people talking about different drives mentioned from their personal experience.

Almighty1 said:

If you already had the drive in your possession, you can easily open the enclosure to get the model number off the internal drive to be 100% certain or you can query it using software to look at the spec sheet for that bare drive as well as read reviews to see what the performance and other things as tested are.

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Crystal Disk Info will tell what model drive is in it. I am not sure that is always accurate. The only way to know for sure is to crack open the drive. However, I wouldn't recommend opening the enclosure for a external drive unless it is out of warranty. To open one you have to crack open the enclosure. If you are not careful you risk breaking the clips and probably voiding the warranty.

Even then there is no guarantee what model drive is an any particular drive. That is because the manufacturer is free to switch internal drives to a different model at any time during the life of a particular model external drive.

For example, I have two WDC My Books external drives I bought five years apart. According to Crystal Disk Info they have different drives in them.

WDC My Book 6TB (2017) => WD Blue WD60EZRZ 5700RPM (CMR)
WDC My Book 6TB (2022) => WD Blue WD60EDAZ 5400RPM (SMR)

MisterEd said:

Crystal Disk Info will tell what model drive is in it. I am not sure that is always accurate. The only way to know for sure is to crack open the drive. However, I wouldn't recommend opening the enclosure for a external drive unless it is out of warranty. To open one you have to crack open the enclosure. If you are not careful you risk breaking the clips and probably voiding the warranty.

Even then there is no guarantee what model drive is an any particular drive. That is because the manufacturer is free to switch internal drives to a different model at any time during the life of a particular model external drive.

For example, I have two WDC My Books external drives I bought five years apart. According to Crystal Disk Info they have different drives in them.

WDC My Book 6TB (2017) => WD Blue WD60EZRZ 5700RPM (CMR)
WDC My Book 6TB (2022) => WD Blue WD60EDAZ 5400RPM (SMR)

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Yes but as I said before, Crystal Disk Info is only when you actually have the physical drive in your hand already but it won't work like if I was on google trying to decide on what 2TB drive to buy if it was a external drive like the 2TB Western Digital My Passport for example since I am trying to find out what the specs are like RPM, cache size etc before even buying it. As for voiding the warranty, as long as you know how to open it, then it's fine and if not, then you shouldn't do it since even if you don't break the clips, you will leave physical marks which will still void the warranty for tampering but ofcourse if you used a credit card to buy the drive, you might have lost the manufacturers warranty which lets say for Western Digital is 3 years so basically you will need to wait until the 3 years is over as anything over the 3 years which they add 1 year will start after the 3 years ended. At that point, you contact the credit card extended warranty benefit department and either they will pay to repair the drive or they will send you a check for what you originally paid for it.

Yes, drives inside can change since it's no different than when your drive fails even for a internal drive, they can send you a newer model that has the same or bigger capacity and ofcourse there were times when the replacement actually had inferior performance specs than the original.

So I am sure even my 2TB 2.5" My Passport Ultra WDC can have different drives in the 3 I have because even the USB cables aren't 100% the same as the other two but ofcourse comparing 2017 to 2022 has a bigger possibility of them being different than if it was asking about what is actually being sold currently since if I was looking for a new drive now, I wouldn't be asking about the model last year but instead what is being currently sold. But in your example, you would already have the drive in your hand and not someone who is trying to find the specs of the product before they decide on what to buy... Maybe the 2.5" drives are easier but that still depends on how many 2.5" 2TB internal drive models that are current models.

Crystal Disk Info is similar to how people who try to determine who made a CD-R as the packaging means nothing since until you use cdrinfo, you will not know who actually made the CD-R so it could be some Taiwanese brand or even India as any brand can change vendors and either the person is trying to find who made the disc they are using which might include it being bad quality or they want to see if they are made by Taiyo Yuden or not but in both cases, you would need the HDD or the CD-R in your possession already. But unlike CD-R's which you can tell is TY or not by the packaging like it has a screw on disc on top of the lid and made in Japan which is normally a very accurate way to know they are TY's before buying, you can't really do the same with external HDD's before buying since there woudn't be the same clues.

For getting specs and stuff, I usually just check on review sites to see how the drives benchmark. At the end of day for myself, an external drive is for additional storage and backup purposes. Performance of the drive itself, really isn't a major concern to me. Whether it transfers at 138MB/sec or 144MB/sec isn't going to make it or break it for me.

Now, if it's the difference between and external mechanical hard drive and an SSD drive, i would put more thought into performance and it's purpose there. Case in point, i had an external HDD for my Mac as a backup drive using TimeMachine. It got the job done, but with a large number of changes, it took quite a while to evaluate what was on the drive, versus the system and then start the backup. I replaced that external HDD with an external SSD and the difference with Time Machine is night and day. Best upgrade I ever made with respect to my Mac. But for something like my Macrium PC images.....no SSD for me there, my handy dandy 8TB 3.5" WD Elements drive has been absolutely fantastic. Eventually I'll upgrade for more space. Been looking at 16TB WD's.

WD Black WD4005FZBX 4TB (256 MB cache)

Ghot said:

WD Black WD4005FZBX 4TB (256 MB cache)

View attachment 71872

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I see that's a 4TB WD Black 3.5-Inch Gaming Hard Drive.

That has better performance that a regular 6 year old 2TB WD Black (WD2003FZEX). Here are my results:

geneo said:

@jimbo45 Like I said it will be better with bursts of small data. Prefetch (superfetch as you are describing it) is mostly for loading programs faster and not data (except some that may be needed to start the program up). Since most peoples programs reside on the system disk, which is usually nvme or Sata SSD now, prefetch is pretty much an anachronism - it doesn't make that big of a difference. when the programs are on SSD. I have left it on myself.

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prefetch and superfetch are not the same things -- most OS'e have some sort of A.I built in which attempts to "learn" from the users aya of using the machine. Superfetch relies on which programs are most used and will "preload" those -- while prefetch will learn from running systems which bits of data (not necessarily whole applications) will likely to be accessed next -- some of this might even be on the paging files which will then be moved into spare RAM for immediate access when required. Superfetch with SSD's doesn't really matter any more -- but prefetch can be a very different animal -- local RAM is still many times faster than even the latest nvme drives.

Cheers
jimbo

MisterEd said:

I see that's a 4TB WD Black 3.5-Inch Gaming Hard Drive.

That has better performance that a regular 6 year old 2TB WD Black (WD2003FZEX). Here are my results:

View attachment 71874

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You are only basing it on the performance between two different systems as a more valid comparison would be both hard drives in the same system because it may or may not be just the HDD but also controller used among other things. It may also be that one HDD has more platters and more heads as well.

MisterEd said:

I see that's a 4TB WD Black 3.5-Inch Gaming Hard Drive.

That has better performance that a regular 6 year old 2TB WD Black (WD2003FZEX). Here are my results:

View attachment 71874

Click to expand...

The WD2003FZEX only has a 64MB cache. I have 4 of the same 2TB Blacks, I believe.
Not installed at the moment though.

jimbo45 said:

prefetch and superfetch are not the same things -- most OS'e have some sort of A.I built in which attempts to "learn" from the users aya of using the machine. Superfetch relies on which programs are most used and will "preload" those -- while prefetch will learn from running systems which bits of data (not necessarily whole applications) will likely to be accessed next -- some of this might even be on the paging files which will then be moved into spare RAM for immediate access when required. Superfetch with SSD's doesn't really matter any more -- but prefetch can be a very different animal -- local RAM is still many times faster than even the latest nvme drives.

Cheers
jimbo

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They are the same think.

Anyway, the point is it collects bits of data or disk addresses so it can preload data that programs need. Since an external drive can be offline and even used elsewhere, it can't have any data that a program needs to run so I seriously doubt prefetch/superfetch would even take external drives into account. Even if it did, this is going to be used for data, not programs, so it is not relevant.

Almighty1 said:

You are only basing it on the performance between two different systems as a more valid comparison would be both hard drives in the same system because it may or may not be just the HDD but also controller used among other things. It may also be that one HDD has more platters and more heads as well.

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I only have one 2TB Western Digital Black. I used to use it internally but removed it when I replaced it with an SSD. Now it is in an external enclosure. I tested it internally when it was in my desktop a couple years ago. I tested it externally with my laptop yesterday. Does that make any difference?