JDPFu.com 2025

When you spend $100 for a 500GB portable USB disk drive, here what you are really getting:

1. $35 SATA disk drive with only a 90 day warranty – see portable disks usually only come with 90 days of warranty. Boo. Some do come with 1 yr warranties, but you deserve 3-5 years, like normal disk drives have, right?
2. $20 SATA to USB v2.x enclosure.
3. Some kind of software to make your life easy. Completely unnecessary.

Those are all retail prices that anyone can easily find online. Basically, you are spending $100 for $50 worth of stuff. Do you feel ripped off? Is it even worse. These portable drives come with only 90 day warranties because the makers know that you probably won’t be completely gentle with them. They also use the cheapest HDD inside that they can find – probably not a WD or Seagate. You can buy portable drives with WD or Seagate on the outside, but they will still have the 90 day warranty because none of the competition will do any longer.

I was able to find an eSATA/USB external 500G disk for $55, but it only had a 1 year warranty. That could be very worth while for many people. I prefer 5 year warranties on my disk drives.

Beat Them With 5 Minutes of Effort

Steps:

1. Purchase a 500GB disk drive for $40 that has a 3 year or 5 year warranty. If you buy 3.5" disks, that’s fine, but 2.5" disks are smaller and can be found at 7200rpm speeds too, but they usually cost a little more.
2. Purchase a disk enclosure for the type of HDD you bought. 2.5" or 3.5" and either SATA or IDE depending on the interface. If you can, get one with an eSATA/USB external connector. I’ll explain why later. These are $15-$20.
3. Spend 3-5 minutes putting the HDD inside the disk enclosure. It is really about 2 simple, keyed connections and 2 screws. Seriously, you don’t need to be mechanically inclined at all. I doubt you could connect it wrong even if you tried.
4. Choose whatever disk backup software that you like. The built-in Windows7 backup tool is fine. If you like, you can use TeraCopy or Duplicati or rdiff-backup (I like GNU stuff best) or rsync or … well there are probably hundreds of free, FLOSS, answers. DO NOT PAY FOR BACKUP SOFTWARE. If you are on Linux, check out Back-In-Time for an amazing, simple, efficient backup solution, especially for home users.

When you are done, you have an external USB 2.x disk drive that works just as well and as fast as the $100-$120 options.

When You May Want To Pay the Extra Money

• It is the company buying the drive and you can’t be bothered with 2-3 items on your expense report. Time = money for everyone.
• You need a hardened enclosure like LACIE makes with rubber protection on the outside.

Those are the only reasons I can come up with for spending $50 too much.

Higher Performance External Solution

USB v2.0 is slow. Sure, it is faster than older versions of USB, but it isn’t the same as a directly attached HDD either. Further, the HDD interface protocol over USB does NOT include all the commands that the SATA or ATA command set does, so for some purposes, USB will never work.

Some of you are thinking I’m going to recommend Firewire. NO! Firewire is faster than USB, but still relatively slow when compared to internal disk connections. Firewall also introduces security concerns that I’d like to avoid. On the PCs I own that came with Firewire, I’ve disabled it inside the BIOS. That’s how serious I think this security flaw is. Also, Firewire requires a non-standard (on PCs at least) connection. If you are going with an extra connection anyway, why not use the best, fastest, most complete answer?

eSATA – Fast and Complete External Disk Control

Most of you probably have heard of eSATA. It is the type of connection that takes the same control language that your internally connected disks use, SATA, and makes it externally available. Hence, the e in front of the SATA. eSATA is just like the internal connector that your hard drives use – same command set and the same performance. It does need a slightly different connector, but those are definitely available. In fact, my Dell 1565 laptop came with a combined USB/eSATA port. I use it for all sorts of things. That laptop came with 2 other USB ports too, so using the eSATA connection doesn’t prevent normal USB uses too. I was surprised to find that this eSATA port could be hot swapped too. Basically, it can be connected and disconnected in a way similar to USB 2 devices, no reboot needed. Not all eSATA controllers support hot swap, so be aware. Of course, if your PC doesn’t have an external eSATA port, then you will have to purchase an adapter to add it. Here’s a link to help you It appears they are under $20.

I have an external eSATA dock that I really like. highly recommended.

Take-aways

1. Use eSATA external disks for higher performance than either Firewire or USB for the same cost.
2. Use normal SATA disks with 5 year warranties, rather than external disks with 90 day or 1 year warranties.
3. Don’t pay extra for external disks, but sometimes you may find a hard to pass up deal. Those deals usually have really cheap components, drives and short warranties.

There you have it.