Internal or external hard drive

[mike13]

I have a Dell Vostro computer with a Intel Core i5-2500 @ 3.30 Ghz processor, The hard drive is 320 Gig, with about 85 Gig of data, which included the Win 8 operating system. I was going to purchase another INTERNAL hard drive so I could clone my existing "C" drive in case that HD fails, but am now considering an External hard drive instead. I believe my computer only has the 2.0 USB slots, so I guess it would take a lot longer to clone the "C" drive to a external hard drive versus an internal hard drive. On an AVERAGE, how long can I expect it to take to clone that 85 Gig of data to a internal hard drive, versus an external hard drive?? Are we talking an hour or two, or maybe 8-10 hours ? Thanks, Mike

Edited December 4, 2012 by mike13

[jaclaz]

You can normally expect *anything* between 30 and 40 Mbytes/second of data transfer on a USB 2.0.

The 85 Gb should take, more or less, between 45 minutes and 1 hour.

As a "generic" comparison, a direct SATA I or II connection would probably take about 2/3 of that time, say 30-40 minutes, a SATA III possibly 1/3 only, say 15-20 minutes.

Of course actual speed depends on such a number of factors that it is impossible to have accurate estimation, if you check some benchmarks:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/hard-drives-and-ssds,3.html

you will see how a SATA disk can deliver *anything* between 50 and 150 Mb/s when writing.

jaclaz

[mike13]

Thanks jaclaz for the reply. Your estimates are close enough. I think I will get an external hard drive, since the transfer time is reasonable. It will also have its own power supply, and not give off any extra heat inside the computer case. Thanks again, Mike