[Richard Pinneau]

I'd like to get an external drive for backup (and per MB price seems now far lower for HD's than zip or jaz).
With one goodsize external I could back up iMac at work, Pismo from road, and Lady's iBook at home. How slow are the USB drives for backup purposes?
Or would SCSI external be cheaper (and are those USB-SCSI adapters really seamless for this sort of backup?)
Got any recommendations? (size, brand, source)
I appreciate learning your experience / strategies.

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—RP

The speed of USB drives isn't as fast as some external SCSI drives or today's FireWire drives - but it is plenty fast enough to make backups. Most people discredit the speed of USB for doing things like, for example doing Digital Video or working with large images - which would run slowly (or not at all) off of a USB drive. Backing up data will work fine.

Getting a SCSI - USB adapter and then buying a SCSI drive would do nothing to speed up your backups. The SCSI-USB adapter runs at the maximum speed of USB, 1.5MBps (mega bytes per second) or 12Mbps (mega bits per second).

I personally like the LaCie external USB drives, although I have very good things about VST, and others as well. Some models of LaCie dives also come with both USB and FireWire connections - so it might make it faster for a few of your machines (they're a bit more expensive, so you'd have to weigh your options)

For comparison, the HDI-30 SCSI port (those funky looking SCSI ports that are on older PowerBooks) run at 1.5MBps - the same speed as USB. I have a PowerBook 5300ce that I hook an external hard drive up to regularly to do large file transfers, and the speed is actually not all that bad. I don't thin USB drives are as slow as many people think they are.

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Eliott Wolfe
Winnetka, Calif

[Richard Pinneau]

Thanks. That encouraging. Comparing it to the old powerbook SCSI port gives me a feel.

My interest in the functionality of the SCSI-USB adapter was also a desire to be able to access the varied SCSI external devices hanging around from earlier years.
That'll be a plus!


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—RP