I want to buy an external hard drive to use as a backup, but my computer only has USB1.1 sockets and the boxes on the drives I’ve looked at say “USB2.”
One clerk in a Staples told me the drive would work with USB1, just that transfers would be slower.
Is this true? I can live with it being slower, but I don’t want to end up with a totally useless drive.
The computer is a Dell Dimension 2100 running WinXP. Pretty old (bought around 2000?) but it works fine and right now I don’t want to have to replace it. Unless you can add/replace the existing sockets?
All USB devices should work in all USB ports - AFAIK, the only sort of scenario where this isn’t true would be things like video capture devices that specifically need the greater bandwidth of high-speed USB 2.0 in order to function at all.
So your USB 2.0 drive should work fine in a USB 1.1 port - data transfer will be slower than if plugged into a 2.0 port, but it should still work.
You may need a PSU for the drive, even if it claims to be bus-powered (but this could happen regardless of the port version you plug it into)
You can buy PCI cards with a USB 2.0 host and ports on them - they work fine and do not usually require additional drivers.
A USB 2 drive will work just fine with USB 1 ports, albeit as you have said slower. See here (scroll down to question 9).
But if your computer has PCI slots, I’d strongly recommend installing a USB 2 expander card, like one of these. Backing up via USB 1.1 would be a very time consuming process.
On preview: I see Mangetout has beaten me to it, but I’ll post this anyway for the links.
USB 2 is about 10 times faster than USB 1. Like has been said it should work. In case you want full speed it’s easy to install a PCI card with USB 2. You can get it as a PCMCIA Card if you have a laptop. Link to site with both cards,and I just randomly picked this one.
One thing to note if you have a mixture of USB ports and a mixture of devices…
If you plug a 1.1 device into a 2.0 port, it will work, but it will cause the root hub for that set of ports to drop down to 1.1 standards - meaning that all the other associated ports (i.e. on the card, or on the hub) will only communicate at 1.1 rates for the duration.
Just dropping in to say that I have done exactly what you propose, with no ill effects. (My backup runs at 3 AM, so the time for backup isn’t an issue for me. but I think my 20-GB backup took about 20 minutes max.) And as soon as I got the chance, I installed a 4-port USB card. Sweet.
(I have a new computer with all USB 2.0. Even sweeter. )
Using a hard drive with a USB 1.1 connection is so incredibly dog slow it’s almost unusable except for the tiniest transfers. Get a 2.0 card or get a newer PC.
Unless you simply mean 20 gigs was the size of the drive I will guarantee you that a **full 20 gigs of data ** on a 1.1 connection will take a far longer than 20 minutes. If the backup program was set to default it may picking up up the incremental changes.
Oh crap, you’re right. That was for my nightly incremental. I forget how long the full backup took; I only did them once just after swapping out drives, and I ran them when time didn’t matter, so I didn’t note how long it took. :smack:
Wow, great replies, very useful! And I trust you all so much more than a Staples sales guy.
Okay, I will purchase the drive and give it a go. If the speed irks me, I will see if I can get my brother to install the pci card for me, assuming there’s a slot.
Mangetout, this “PSU” thingy you mention: do I need to check when buying the drive to see if the drive can use/accept one if needed? Like, um, it requires some plug or whatever to be built in to the drive? Or can I assume all drives will take one if needed?
I think the PSU that Mangetout mentions is a power supply for the drive. USB can provide power over its cable; some drives can run on the USB power alone, others require an external power supply, other drives can use either USB (“bus”) power or an external power supply. Some USB implementations (laptops probably) do not provide USB power, or not enough power over USB to power some external hard drives.
Yes, it’s faster, but real-world USB data transfer speeds vary so much that exact speed specifications and comparisons are meaningless. Either one could have a (slight to very serious) speed decrement compared to the spec, depending on the devices in use.
USB is a “Thank god it works” type of technology. What it gives away in speed, it makes up for with plug-and-play convenience.
That’s right - and most bus-powered USB drives work in most situations - when they don’t work straight out of the box, most of them have a facility for an external PSU (but this is often an extra item and may be difficult to find.
Some drives also offer the ability to bond two different USB hubs together to get the required power - and a double USb cable may be provided for this.
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