External USB3 HDD

[Chucaro]

I am looking for an external storage to plug on my Sony Vaio 14" SVE14A16FGH.
I would like to use it for storage my photos and also to place and access on it the images that are on post processing instead of using the inbuilt HDD.

Is the My Book 1T Western Digital fast enough to do that or I have to go for a solid state drive?

The reason why I was thinking in using the external drive for storing and accessing the images on process is because I am a bit paranoid with excessive heating in the inbuilt HDD and reduce his life.

Having the software in the inbuilt HDD and placing the work in progress in the external drive will reduce the amount of work on the LT drive?

Your inputs are appreciated. :)

[Ferret]

I use an external USB 3.0 drive - subjective feelings are it is very fast.

However, I think what you want to do does not make sense to me. Your internal HDD is faster than any USB drive, so use it to do your work. Use the external drive as a back up device to your HDD and setup a backup system.

It then does not matter if your HDD fails, it's only a matter of time anyway.

[Fluids]

I just picked up a Seagate 2TB external USB3.0 for $139.00 from JB Hi-Fi

Have had a 1TB USB2.0 version of the same for the last year with no issues (cost me $112.00)

[Chucaro]

Thank you for your reply, I was thinking that a transfer rate of 4.8Gbps will be very good for accessing work in progress.
The thing tat I do not know is if the speed of the external drive will utilize that transfer rate or just will slow down the process.

[Ferret]

Thank you for your reply, I was thinking that a transfer rate of 4.8Gbps will be very good for accessing work in progress.
The thing tat I do not know is if the speed of the external drive will utilize that transfer rate or just will slow down the process.

Transfer rate is what USB is capable of, does not mean you get that since no disk can read or write data at those speeds.

The actual external drive will be just a regular SATA drive coupled to a USB interface so I don't see how that can help other than make things slightly slower overall as there is another communications layer in the process. But again probably only has a small effect because the mechanical bits of the drive itself are the limiting factor.

How fast the external drive really is compared to your HDD will depend on other things - rpm and cache size for instance.

[dmdigital]

If you are using the USB 3.0 HDD as your scratch disk in Photoshop then this will give you improved performance but if you are only using it for storage then I doubt you will get any improvement in performance.