Do some external hard drives download fast than others?

I use a 250gb MD, and I paid about $60 new. Now I backup my files about once a week and the process takes about 10minutes. Each time I am backing up roughly 9GB. My question is whether it is my laptop that is causing it to take 10minutes, or the external hard drive. Is 10min a standard time and I should just let it go?

I am mainly curios as I have 2 flash drives from geek squad, and the 2gb which is 5yrs old take about 3minutes to copy files on, that my brand new 16gb can do in under a minute.

Or am I just a nut? And if I am not a nut, what super cool fast download external drive do you recommend that isn't over $150?

 

You are a nut. :-D

Seriously, this just seems like a non-issue to me. First, I don't know that 10 minutes to copy 9GB to an external drive - I presume via USB - is excessive. And, even it it's a little slower than some other drives, so what? You do this once a week and it takes 10 minutes. Again, this is a non-issue in my view.

 

Hi

There are different transfer speeds available. Within the USB "family", there is USB 1.0 (my guess is your old flash drive uses this), USB 2.0 (much faster, and likely what your external drive and other flash drives use), and USB 3.0 (came out within the last several months).

Out of the three, USB 3.0 is the fastest. However, in order to take advantage of the 3.0 speeds, the device AND computer must have USB 3.0 capability, which I'm pretty sure your laptop doesn't have. So even if you could find a cheap external drive with USB 3.0, it would only go at USB 2.0 speeds since your laptop is limited to USB 2.0. Being that it's impossible to upgrade this on almost all laptops (and even if you could, it would completely break your $150 budget!), your choices are slim to none.

I agree that 10 minutes a week is a very minor inconvenience, especially when it's for a backup, one of the most important things to do with computers (especially these days, where almost everything we own is in digital format, whether it be pictures, videos, etc.).

The only question I have is, why don't you schedule the backup to occur during the night when you're not using the computer, so you can be sleeping for that 10 minutes? The other two options are to A) get a 16GB flash drive and simply save all of your data to that instead of on the laptop itself, or B) leave your external drive connected and save everything to it instead of the laptop. Either of these choices eliminates the need for the 10 minute weekly transfer.

 

Thanyou mcsmc, that was the answer I needed. I wish the answer was different, but at least you were helpful. Sorry usafveteran, but you were not helpful, no thanks from me:wave