good external hard drives (e.g. WD Elements)?

[Fernando Cassia]

On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 7:10 AM, Mike Cloaked<mike.cloaked at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have been using a Seagate FreeAgent Go external usb drive for this purpose
> for some time and has worked flawlessly.

With all due respect, while most people here keep mentioning "brand
names" it means diddly squat.
What is important is the USB-to-IDE _CHIPSET_ used inside those enclosures.

Nothing guarantees that Seagate won't use a chipset "a" on its 500GB
drives and several months down the line switch to some other chipset
from another brand that does USB+eSATA or whatever...

What you get from a brand name is the quality and looks of the plastic
enclosure, and maybe power supply (internal or external etc).

But in the end, you have a normal hard drive inside (Western Digital
or Seagate, most of the time), and a USB-to-IDE _chipset_.

That's what you should care about.

Performance and reliability between different usb-to-ide chipsets varies widely.

The best performance I found has been with a Made-in-Taiwan enclosure
using the Genesis Logic GL811E chipset.
Yet it had random lockups when I used it on Win2k.

The most reliable? The the ALI M5621 Chipset, but which is significantly slower.

Look at this page for all the various USB-to-IDE chipsets used inside
all those external USB hard drives and enclosures

http://2xod.com/articles/USB_Enclosure_Benchmarks/

And by all means do readthe following horror stories for devices which
use a particular revision of a Cypress USB-to-IDE chipset
http://daltrey.org/linux/cypress.html

FC