Furthermore, people seem to have a lot of trouble with these. It's as if harddrive manufacturers stuff the drives that aren't selling into chintzy boxes and put them on the shelves as bait for the unwary. Either that, or people expect too much from these "portable" units. I decided to take another approach and scratch-build a half-terabyte of dependable network attached storage.
My first stop was Tom's Hardware Page. Always a source of reliable third-party reviews, its the starting point for a lot of my computer projects. I was immediately drawn to the Seagate Momentus XT Review. I should have actually read the article, because the drive in question received the rare Best of Tom's award for excellent performance because of it's "Adaptive Memory Technology," which moves frequently-accessed files to non-volatile RAM, increasing Windows boot speeds by 300% or more - not for the prowess of the drive's inherent geometry and mechanics. Seagate's choice of the 500 Gigabyte Momentus drive for the XT modification was instructive, but not conclusive.
Eventually, I found my way to Perfect Notebook Storage: Seven 2.5” 500 GB Drives, which was what I was looking for. It turns out that 500 Gb is the practical limit for current platter recording technologies and common form-factors, so it is a very reasonable size for an economical design. There are also a lot of tried and true 500Gb SATA drives, which Tom's concludes are nearly identical from a performance point of view. Any of these would be a good choice, depending on your specific requirements:
- Fujitsu MJA2500BH
- Hitachi Travelstar 5K500.B
- Samsung HM500LI
- Seagate Momentus 5400.6
- Seagate Momentus 7200.4
- Toshiba MK5055GSX
- Western Digital WD Scorpio Blue WD5000BEVT
I've linked to the specific drives mentioned in the article cited, but there are other variations. For instance, Seagate drives with "G-Force" anti-shock technology have a "G" appended to their model designation. I settled on the Hitachi Travelstar, primarily because low power consumption and heat seemed far more important to me in this application than other factors, such as drive latency, for example. Your mileage may vary.
I began my search for a suitable enclosure by simply looking for the cheapest available - a box is a box, right? I soon discovered that the $6 plastic numbers were no bargain. In fact, if you're upgrading a laptop (possibly with a Momentus XT) and you just want to clone your operating system and data to a new haddrive, a USB-To-SATA cable might be a better choice. After rejecting the bargain basement cases, the the feature-creep went on and on. Better heat-transfer. Sturdier mounting of the USB-to-SATA electronics. Superior bus power characteristics. Finally, it became clear that the new USB 3.0 specification (SuperSpeed USB in marketing jargon) was what would be required.
Since SuperSpeed USB products only began to appear in Jan. 2010, there is still an early-adopter penalty to be paid with these devices. Although you may currently support only USB 2.0, the ten-fold increase in the data transfer rate of SuperSpeed USB 3.0 nicely matches SATA 2.0 throughput, and its backward compatibility makes it the natural choice for this application.
Returning to Tom's, I found that four USB 3.0 drive enclosures featured in Portable Performance: Four USB 3.0 Enclosures For Your 2.5” Drive were essentially equal, but I opted for the ruggedized Acomdata Samurai, which was not included.
Once you've selected your components, assembly of the unit is easy, even for the severely tech-challenged. (For the truly hopeless, there is the Iomega eGo.) Simply install the drive following the instructions supplied with the enclosure. If you don't have a USB 3.0 connector on your system / network you can add a SuperSpeed USB card to an available PCI express slot for maximum performance. As with the enclosures, the limited number of supporting chipsets for this technology currently make these cards essentially identical. I went with the MSI card.
Acomdata SDEXXXU3E Samurai Data Sheet
Travelstar 5K500.B Data Sheet
MSI Star-USB3 Data
