Fastest data saves: flash stick, ext. HD, int. HD, USB 2, DVD-RW, CD-RW or firewire?

Factual Questions
1

I need to regularly back up roughly 1 gig of data, almost all being MS Word and Excel. Which saves fastest?

(Sorry about the compression/simplification in the title bar. Hope you get the idea.)

2

You are mixing up a couple of things here. USB2 and Firewire are interfaces to the computer. They are not storage media.

I believe it will break down like this ranked by speed.

  1. Some type of flash memory.
  2. Internal Hard Drive/External Hard Dive via USB2. They should be very close in speed.
  3. DVD-RW.
  4. CD-RW - although this cannot hold a gigabyte of data. It maxes out at 700 mb or so.

In reality, they are all going to be fast. Burning a DVD or CD only takes a few minutes and the others should take less than 2 minutes. I think an external hard drive is the way to go but any of them are workable. Backing up on a new CD or DVD every day means that you can pull any version going back in time. Flash memory is easily portable. Hard drives are fast and easy to work with. Some external drives have a one button backup feature.

3

Assuming various storage media receive incoming files at the same rate, which interface transfers faster - USB2 or Firewire?

4

For large, sustained transfers, I think firewire is generally recognised as faster; there’s not a lot of difference on paper (USB2 High-Speed is 480MB/s, Firewire is 400MB/s), but a number of practical and logistic factors tend to combine in such a way as to make Firewire come out faster.

5

Relaworld rankings will be like this fastest to slowest

Internal SATA hard drive

Internal IDE (assuming latest ATA interfaces)

External Firewire (FW IO slightly faster than USB2)

External External USB2

Flash Memory (note read speeds are as fast or faster then platter based HD speeds - Write speeds are considerably slower due to memory write architecture limitations

DVD RW (note RW media considerably slower than write once)

CD RW (note RW media considerably slower than write once)

6

How safe are external drives from bad power spikes–surges bad enough to toast the motherboard? If connected via a firewire/USB cable, is the external HD also vulnerable?

Do prudent computer users disconnect the external HD, when the device isn’t in use–and is it a quick and easy disconnect?

7

In windows, external (USB) hard drives are semi-hot-pluggable - you can plug them in while the system is running, but you’re supposed to stop them before you unplug them; many of the smaller external drives contain a 2.5" laptop HD and are bus-powered, so if your computer survives the spike, the drive should be fine. Larger ones based on 3.5" desktop hard drives (usually offering larger capacity) have their own external power supply unit which may or may not suppress surges. I’d say they’re probably no more or less vulnerable to surges than any other piece of hardware.

One option we haven’t yet discussed is the installation of a hard drive caddy; you install these in place of a 5.25" drive and in the removable part, you install an 3.5" IDE hard drive - it won’t be hot-pluggable (unless your motherboard supports that, which it won’t), but transfer speeds are very good indeed; the same as if the drive were permanently installed inside the case. They’re also quite cheap.

8

If price isn’t a problem, SCSI hard disks (internal or external) are usually the best choice for high-performance I/O. Arrays of disks can be used with data stripping to increase I/O bandwidth.