External 500GB cheaper!

Soldato
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It seems very odd to me that external drives are cheaper:-

(Internal) Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB = £213.79

Rotational Speed: 7,200 RPM
Capacity: 500GB
Buffer: 16MB


(External) Western Digital WDG1U5000U MyBook = £196.17

Capacity: 500GB
7200 RPM
16MB Cache

:confused:

HEADRAT
 
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Wouldnt touch an external hard drive with a barge pole unless needed for a specific reason. Uses USB connection and not SATA so limited bandwidth.

Sorry if you know the above, just me assuming :) .
 
Soldato
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I know what you mean but you would think an external would be cheaper, why wouldn't you just buy the external drive and rip out the HD and save yourself £17 ;)

I don't think WD make an IDE 500GB drive so the drives inside the enclosure may be SATA.

HEADRAT
 
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HEADRAT said:
I know what you mean but you would think an external would be cheaper, why wouldn't you just buy the external drive and rip out the HD and save yourself £17 ;)

I don't think WD make an IDE 500GB drive so the drives inside the enclosure may be SATA.

HEADRAT

Well worth investigating for the money you can save. You gonna try it out?
 
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Oh i see exactly what you mean. Genius. That could be possible seeing as both specifications for external and internal are the same. The only thing i can think of is maybe the usb transfer is fully intergrated into the hard drive. If not and there is some sort of switch from usb to sata then your in the money.

And yeah seems illogical for an external drive to be more than an internal drive if they are pretty much identical.

If you give it a go please tell us the outcome.
 
Soldato
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I wouldn't think the native drives interface would be anything other than IDE or SATA, pull the drive out and you've got a free external enclosure and your £17 better off.

If my suspisions are correct the internal drive will be a SATA device.

HEADRAT
 
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afraser2k said:
The external also does Firewire, so not that bad as an external drive? Maybe they're just trying to shift more external drives to the consumer? :)

Don't think the Western Digital WDG1U5000U MyBook does firewire?

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Isnt there some SATA PCI card with 2 or 4 external SATA ports + a power one?

they should do that cos its still gonna be faster then USB and firewire put together...

I think there is such a thing just aint seen it....
 
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HighlandeR said:
they should do that cos its still gonna be faster then USB and firewire put together...

Yep my MOBO has external SATA, problem is that a mechanical spinning disk medium wouldn't come close to saturating USB or Firewire, roll out IRam2 with a SATA2 interface ;)

HEADRAT
 
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HEADRAT said:
Yep my MOBO has external SATA, problem is that a mechanical spinning disk medium wouldn't come close to saturating USB or Firewire, roll out IRam2 with a SATA2 interface ;)

HEADRAT

My seagate shows an average of 70 megabytes per second, which is certainly above the maximum 60 megabytes per sec of USB2.0. (the 480 figure is megabits per second, theres 8 bits in a byte of course)
 
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Sure the external isn't 2x250 striped? My 2x250 SE16s cost a fair bit less than a single 500gig drive. The image on the WD site might be a stock external enclosure image, the actual 500gig drive could be a slight larger.
 
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mosfet said:
Sure the external isn't 2x250 striped? My 2x250 SE16s cost a fair bit less than a single 500gig drive. The image on the WD site might be a stock external enclosure image, the actual 500gig drive could be a slight larger.

Good point :confused:
However, it seems unlikely ;)
 
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