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GCN Home > 06/16/08 issue

Medium-range backup

GCN Lab reviews: When you need a terabyte or less of extra storage, external hard drives answer the call

By Greg Crowe

FROM TIME TO TIME, every network administrator needs a little extra storage — more than key drives can handle but not nearly as much as a dedicated storage server provides. That is when an external hard drive comes in handy.

An external hard drive is a small-scale, portable solution that can fill a variety of needs. Perhaps someone in the graphics department needs more room for clip art, a vital database needs regular backup, or your Microsoft Exchange server needs somewhere to send all those log files. Whatever the purpose, an external hard drive can fill that niche.

We rounded up 11 drives from just about every company that makes them. Buffalo Technology, CMS Products, G-Technology, Iomega, Kanguru Solutions, Maxtor, Seagate, SimpleTech, Verbatim America, Western Digital and Wiebetech sent entries for review. The drives ranged from 500G to 1T, but most of them were 1T.

Although we knew we would get faster file transfers using an External Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (eSATA) port, we didn’t think every drive would have it yet, so we decided to test performance using the USB 2.0 port.

The performance of any Serial ATA drive spinning at 7,200 rpm sending data through a USB 2.0 connection will be similar to any other. With file collections of 100M and smaller, the differences were nearly impossible to detect with a stopwatch. However, when the folder of test files exceeded 1G, the differences began to be significant enough to report. The bigger your files, the clearer the differences in performance.

Our form-factor grade (which is listed as “Ease of Use” in each grade box) was based mostly on the size and weight of the drive. The location of ports and ability to place the drive horizontally or vertically also affected this grade to a lesser degree.

The main thing that affected the features grade was the number of ports. We were also concerned about whether any drive management or backup software was included and how easy it was to use, or ignore, as the case may be. Last, we gave a value grade based on the price in relation to capacity and performance in the other categories.

More news on related topics: Storage Management, Content / Record Management, Data Management, IT Management