Great storage method, is it available in UK???

[Mark]

OK so I was looking for a descent storage method for my laptop and saw a few
things that I should get like a PCMCIA card that changes the very slow
cardbus to a super fast twin serial ata port, marvelous, and its available
in the UK (albeit at a rip off price compared to states £40 here and $25
there) I then saw this combo hard drive thingy made by addonics which would
work very well with the serial ata card and also a reaonable price and would
allow me to insert any IDE hard drive (I was thinking of the Maxtor II 300GB
for about £250) into this thing and have a very fast transfer rate between
my laptop and the drive. Sounds great hey? well the problem I'm having is I
can't find a similar product in the UK, the only external hard drives I can
find are complete units using only the slow usb2 and firewire and the even
slower pcmcia cardbus, these types of speeds aren't acceptable for a working
hard drive and I really would like the combo hard disk case as it has an
external power supply for the hard drives, also you have the flexability of
interchanging the IDE hard drives in the unit which is a very cheap way of
doing things, but what with it being a product from the states it doesn't
have the correct power supply and I don't really want to order anything from
the states anyway, I've had some bad experiences with ordering from there
before.

Anyway, if anyone has any suggestions or some links to websites that might
have this combo drive thing adapted for UK use I would be very very
gratefull.
Here is the link to the american product
http://www.addonics.com/products/external_hdd/combo_hd.asp

Tanks in advance

Mark

 

[Alien Zord]

OK so I was looking for a descent storage method for my laptop and saw a few
things that I should get like a PCMCIA card that changes the very slow
cardbus to a super fast twin serial ata port, marvelous, and its available
in the UK
snip <

I got an external USB2.0 box for notebook hard drives that is only an inch
longer that the drive itself, powered from two USB ports so no external
power required. With a Hitachi 40GB 5400 rpm drive the actual file transfer
rate is just over 17MB/s which is the limit of the hard drive and not the
interface. The box is labelled Mentor and cost 10 quid. They also make a
3.5" version that does use external PSU. USB2.0 is faster than any hard
drive's sustained transfer rate so a properly designed interface is not
going to impede on drive's performance.
http://www.bona-uk.com/ click "Into web site", PC products, Enclosure

 

[kony]

I got an external USB2.0 box for notebook hard drives that is only an inch
longer that the drive itself, powered from two USB ports so no external
power required. With a Hitachi 40GB 5400 rpm drive the actual file transfer
rate is just over 17MB/s which is the limit of the hard drive and not the
interface. The box is labelled Mentor and cost 10 quid. They also make a
3.5" version that does use external PSU. USB2.0 is faster than any hard
drive's sustained transfer rate so a properly designed interface is not
going to impede on drive's performance.
http://www.bona-uk.com/ click "Into web site", PC products, Enclosure

USB2 isn't faster than "any" hard drive's sustained transfer rate. It
practice it'll never go much faster than 20MB/s even with a drive capable
of significantly faster. I"m not necessary claiming the Hitachi drive is
capable of faster than 17MB/s though, I don't know about that particular
drive.

 

[Alien Zord]

USB2 isn't faster than "any" hard drive's sustained transfer rate. It
practice it'll never go much faster than 20MB/s even with a drive capable
of significantly faster. I"m not necessary claiming the Hitachi drive is
capable of faster than 17MB/s though, I don't know about that particular
drive.

http://www.usb.org/developers/docs
Document: USB revision 2.0 specification, page 83, High-speed bulk
transaction mode of operation: 53.248 MB/s net (60MB/s raw, i.e. 480Mb/s)).

The fastest PATA hard drive I ever tested (in real world mode under NTFS,
not brute force raw segment read and write) achieved 49MB/s on outer tracks
and 32MB/s on inner tracks.

Most USB2.0 devices and drivers operate in high-speed interrupt or
isosynchronous mode at 24MB/s. However, bulk transaction mode is available
to them that's why I mentioned "properly designed interface".

 

[kony]

http://www.usb.org/developers/docs
Document: USB revision 2.0 specification, page 83, High-speed bulk
transaction mode of operation: 53.248 MB/s net (60MB/s raw, i.e. 480Mb/s)).

Fair enough, I should've written "contemporary USB2 devices", not "USB2".

On the other hand, can we really claim USB2 is faster than a hard drive's
sustained transfer rate if we only have a theoretical example, that for it
to actually be faster we'd have to have actual devices with a real HDD,
not being bottlenecked by the enclosure's USB2 interface?

Wouldn't it be more appropriate to write that it has the potential to be
faster, but that currently it isn't?

 

[Alien Zord]

480Mb/s)).

Fair enough, I should've written "contemporary USB2 devices", not "USB2".

On the other hand, can we really claim USB2 is faster than a hard drive's
sustained transfer rate if we only have a theoretical example, that for it
to actually be faster we'd have to have actual devices with a real HDD,
not being bottlenecked by the enclosure's USB2 interface?

Wouldn't it be more appropriate to write that it has the potential to be
faster, but that currently it isn't?

I'm expecting some newly designed 3.5" external USB2.0 HDD enclosures
shortly so will do a real world test then.