One more post about hard drives
Posted by Nathaniel.
Western Digital announced a new line of 7200 rpm laptop drives today and I was checking them out when I noticed something interesting in the descriptions of interfaces for external drives.
The number that always gets thrown around with USB is 480 Mb/s and Firewire comes in 400 Mb/s and 800 Mb/s varies while eSATA is 3000 Mb/s.
The thing that I’d never seen before though were the words that followed those numbers… For USB it was “maximum burst transfer rate” and for the others it’s “maximum sustained transfer rate.” There’s a big difference between burst and sustained.
June 2nd, 2008 at 11:02 pm Using
Huh, that’s pretty interesting. What site had that quote? I’ve not seen it before either, and it could explain the theoretical vs actual discrepancy in USB performance.
mmmm, eSATA…. shiny….
June 3rd, 2008 at 3:10 pm Using
The interface comparisons are at the bottom of this page:
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/resources/DriveCompatibilityguide.asp