Re: RSFC Komputer Korner: Help Needed

Scott Hendryx wrote:
"Tonawanda Kardex" <tonawandakardex@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:1183526870.990595.127860@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Jul 4, 1:17 am, El Diablo con Queso
<queso....@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Tonawanda Kardex wrote:
On Jul 3, 9:18 pm, Tony Rice <e...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Tonawanda Kardex <tonawandakar...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote innews:1183499048.529740.145310@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:
My wife has an old Sony VIAO machine running XP. We want to turn it
into an external hard drive. How do we do this?
[Note: on my old Mac iBook, we accomplished the same task by toggling
a button in a control panel. Easy as pie.]
Or to truely make it an external hard drive, remove the drive and put it
into a USB external 2.5" HD enclosure
USB? Yeah, if I want it to crawl ...
Are you worried about performance? If you are using USB 1.1 that is
true but USB 2.0 is rated up to 480Mbps. Can I assume you planning on
accessing this laptop over an 802.11a/b/g/n network? USB 2.0 is gonna
kick ass over any of those networks on raw speed. I'm assuming that
you want a network share and therefore pulling the drive for a 2.5"
enclosure it pointless? If you don't want a network share and don't
plan on using the laptop anymore, pull the drive and spring for a $25
enclosure if you want the best performance.

I call BS. I have USB 2.0 hard drives that transfer slower than
molasses. Rated? Maybe in a lab, but not in my world of practical
application.


One of the problems in not knowing what you are doing is buying an USB hard drive, a cheap one, that has no cache. The less cache, the harder the driver works and the pipe gets clogged. If you want USB 2.0 thru-put, then you have to buy a USB drive with the largest cache you can afford.


The idea behind any cache is trying to avoid repeatedly doing the same task over and over. CPUs have caches to avoid having to go to main memory which is a huge performance hit. Drives have have hardware caches to try to speed up througput and Windows uses a large part of your physical memory as a cache for programs and data. The physical transfer rate isn't affected by the cache size. If the drive cache is small it may spend more time grabbing the data off the disk, thereby slowing down throughput, but it still has to send it down that same cable, whether that data is in the cache or not. Data grabbed from the hardware cache and data fetched off disk will travel at the same rate down the USB cable. The latency of physically grabbing data from the drive will slow things down over grabbing cached data but the USB transfer rate is unaffected by the presence or size of a cache. The cache size has an effect on throughput no matter the interface, it isn't something USB specific. There is a lot that goes in to caching algorithms, trying to determine what will be fetched next, how much to fetch, how to keep the cache current, but their presence doesn't effect physical transfer characteristics, it just helps avoid having to repeat a process that has already been previously done.
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