What all should I look for in an external hard drive? Transfer rates? I'm not sure what a buufer is exactly. I'm wondering how two different 200gb hard drives can have a difference of $200 in price. I'm basically looking to back up all of my music, and store CAD drawings to. Thanks a bunch.
Transfer speed's not going to be any better regardless of any parameters unless the drive runs external S-ATA and you have a card / motherboard to support it. While those drives are fast (near 70MB/s rather than 30) they'll probably be more expensive. USB2, firewire, 8MB cache, 16MB cache, they won't make much difference. Go for a cheap one if that's all you need. Just make sure you have 7200rpm.
Look for a Firewire compatible drive Don't just take my word for it, there is plenty of data out there. Although the actual speeds at first appear to favour USB 2.0 over Firewire, if you look at the way the devices transfer data there is a big difference. FireWire, uses a "Peer-to-Peer" architecture in which the peripherals are intelligent and can negotiate bus conflicts to determine which device can best control a data transfer * Hi-Speed USB 2.0 uses a "Master-Slave" architecture in which the computer handles all arbitration functions and dictates data flow to, from and between the attached peripherals (adding additional system overhead and resulting in slower data flow control) FireWire vs. USB 2.0 Hard Drive Performance Comparison Read and write tests to the same IDE hard drive connected using FireWire and then Hi-Speed USB 2.0 show: Read Test: * 5000 files (300 MB total) FireWire was 33% faster than USB 2.0 * 160 files (650MB total) FireWire was 70% faster than USB 2.0 Write Test: * 5000 files (300 MB total) FireWire was 16% faster than USB 2.0 * 160 files (650MB total) FireWire was 48% faster than USB 2.0
