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Hard Drive or Memory Card?

Well I am looking for more storage with my laptop. I can either buy another HD for the ultra bay, or should I go memory card route? (since the SD now goes to 4gig, and the price is dropping rather fast). My question is can I run music right off the memory card through a card reader, or is it too slow?.....and which would you t.a's prefer?....I am really undecided right now...an HD with more than 40gigs of space, or a memory cards that I can swap depending on what music I want to play.....hmmm...I dunno....

and BTW I have an IBM A31 Thinkpad..

You can buy portable hard drives that plug into the usb 2.0 plug or firewire these are as fast as the hard drive inside the computer so you can run programs + music directly off them delay free! You can get them in pretty big sizes, i have one and its 40gb and only a little bigger then my wallet

i would get the hard drive. you will still need to store your music somewhere besides a memory card anyway.

hard drives can be had for real cheap. an external hd should cost you less then $1/gig. you can even buy a hd drive and an external enclosure for even cheaper.

memory cards are not cost effective for what you are trying to do.

I have an external, 200GB HDD. Since I am using a desktop HDD in it, The drive unit is bigger than the 2.5" drives, but I get more space. It is USB2.0 / Firewire (IEEE 1394). I think the total cost was around $150 after shipping and everything.

definatly go with an external HDD, its worth it.

The problem is that my Laptop is older....it doesn't have USB 2.0 or firewire.....the only way is to add another internal through the ultra bay...and what are the negative factors of using memory cards?....besides the price of the media right now?

I dont know why everyone is saying get an external HDD, he says he has on open drive bay so get a harddrive for that. IMO a HDD makes much more sense than an SD card simply because it shuold be so much cheaper.

However, you are correct in that SD cards offer a lot of advantages. I am not sure of this but I would assume they are way faster than a hard drive simply because they are solid state memory. Also because of this they are much lighter and offer much lower power consumption, both important features in a laptop. Also because it is solid state it has a very stable data retention, drop an SD card and I bet the data is fine just don't try it with a hard drive.

I am not certain, but I thought that memory card bus speeds were around 10-16MB/s while a hard drive will be around > 40MB/s.

quote:

Originally posted by SUNWmsf I am not certain, but I thought that memory card bus speeds were around 10-16MB/s while a hard drive will be around > 40MB/s.

Your right, sdcard.com says that the transfer speed is only 10 MB/s.... lame

if your laptop is older then how are you connecting a memory card to it? if you add a card reader it will be a USB 1.1 reader anyway. it will only be as fast as what its connected to.

there are "pro" memory cards out now that are like 70x so that shouldnt be an issue anymore, but i dont know for sure.

i really think your best bet is to just add an internal hd to your current system.

you should buy yourself an external drive that can back up all of your music though. my buddy never backed up his mac and it failed and he lost everything.

Get something like an Iriver H320 , I got one and I can listen to music anywhere plus store anything I want on it, and they come in 20 and 40gb sizes, but there not cheap.

But to be honest you should go for a harddrive to plug into your bay, you can add in just a regular desktop hardrive which are cheap, and can easly get a 200gb one, if you need to have a USB2 or Firewire pluggin, just get a PC Card that has the features, I'm looking ta getting one, and its only 80 bux canadian, and gives you 1 Firewire and 2 USB2.0 slots.

go with an external hd

The most economical thing to do for you is go with external HDD (build it yourself w/ the HDD & the enclosure) and get a PC Card for USB 2.0 (approx $20) or Firewire (or both if you want :: approx: $35). You can get USB 2.0 enclosures that are cheaper that dont include the firewire if you want. The money that you spend on a 60GB HDD for your laptop is the same as you would spend on a 200GB HDD + enclosure.

As stated above, the CF & SD cards are slower, they might have high-speed ones, but those will cost you a couple hundred $$.

I'm buying a laptop real soon and selling my desktop PC, how would I go about buying an external hard drive enclosure where I can go from IDE to USB/Firewire without it being too expensive?

quote:

Originally posted by Max Thomson I'm buying a laptop real soon and selling my desktop PC, how would I go about buying an external hard drive enclosure where I can go from IDE to USB/Firewire without it being too expensive?

Search for "drive enclosures" this is what you want. There are lots of these around by lots of companies.

Something like this: http://www.pcmicrostore.com/PartDet...01312&kbid=1007

But if you look you should be able to find some cheaper ones for less then $30.

EDIT: like this one: http://www.pcmicrostore.com/PartDetail.aspx?q=p:10500976

Here is what I purchased about a month ago:

- Silver 3.5" Aluminum USB 2.0 / Firewire External IDE Enclosure: http://www.xpcgear.com/caseufe740.html

- 200GB Western Digital HDD: http://www.mwave.com/mwave/ProdHD-I...+Drives+%2D+IDE

Total comes to about $145 before shipping. I purchased with some systems I was building for friends and built another one of these enclosure setups for my dad, so shipping was covered for me. I looked into all the options and read as many reviews as I could. The 3.5" enclosures that have fans are plastic and many reviews said they have a chance of dying out in a few months. The alumnium enclosures are smaller, dont have fans, but dissipate the heat really well. The enclosure itself gets warm, but not hot.

As for why I went with the USB 2.0 / Firewire, I have a laptop that supports it and read that the chipset that opperates the firewire enclosures was a better chipset. I also read some problems with the cheaper USB 2.0 chipset. Like I have said before, I have had this for about a month or 2 and have had 0 problems. Never had to install any drivers, simply plug and play.

Hard Drive:
-cheaper (about $1/GB)
-bigger (up to about 200GB)
-faster (about 50MB/sec)

Memory Cards:
-expensive (at least $100/GB)
-smaller (up to 4GB?)
-slower (much lower than HDDs)


looks like a no-brainer to me...

If you really wanted to be cool, you could get Firewire800 and double your speed.

And if you really needed space, you could get a 300GB drive. They dont make enclosures that support the newly released, 400GB drives yet (or at least not that i have seen).

So hd is the way to go.....I was gonna get an PCMCIA Card bus controller for usb 2.0 on my laptop....but the thing is, is that most controllers I see will not fit WITH my wireless card which really sucks sometimes....I can get an PCMICA adaptor that can handle a CF card and still use my wireless...hmmm.....maybe I will just get another HD for my comp......or does anyone know a card bus that has a pig tail for USB 2.0 so that it doesn't get in the way of the other card?......or even a firewire one would be cool too...

quote:

Originally posted by onceler The most economical thing to do for you is go with external HDD (build it yourself w/ the HDD & the enclosure) and get a PC Card for USB 2.0 (approx $20) or Firewire (or both if you want :: approx: $35). You can get USB 2.0 enclosures that are cheaper that dont include the firewire if you want. The money that you spend on a 60GB HDD for your laptop is the same as you would spend on a 200GB HDD + enclosure. As stated above, the CF & SD cards are slower, they might have high-speed ones, but those will cost you a couple hundred $$.

I totally agree. Here's a good enclosure kit that the pc shop i work at sells. They're pretty reliable, haven't had any problems since we've started selling them early 2003 and i own a couple myself.

http://www.coolmaxusa.com/products_gemini.asp?item=4

quote:

Originally posted by dj chex I totally agree. Here's a good enclosure kit that the pc shop i work at sells. They're pretty reliable, haven't had any problems since we've started selling them early 2003 and i own a couple myself. http://www.coolmaxusa.com/products_gemini.asp?item=4

Wow..that looks cool.....now just to find a good PCMCIA controller that would allow me to use my wireless card too!

Here are some PCMCIA USB 2.0 cards that use a dongle:

http://www.bixnet.com/seezusb20cap.html
http://www.usbgear.com/USBG2UE.html

or just use this google search:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...G=Google+Search

Anyone know where I can get those PCMCIA w/dongle in canada?

quote:

Originally posted by Dj Ricky H Anyone know where I can get those PCMCIA w/dongle in canada?

I'll second that, I want to add USB2.0 and possible Firewire to my laptop, but want to also have room to either have a Wifi card or a sound card plugged into the PCMCIA cardslot.

quote:

Originally posted by auujay I dont know why everyone is saying get an external HDD, he says he has on open drive bay so get a harddrive for that. IMO a HDD makes much more sense than an SD card simply because it shuold be so much cheaper. However, you are correct in that SD cards offer a lot of advantages. I am not sure of this but I would assume they are way faster than a hard drive simply because they are solid state memory. Also because of this they are much lighter and offer much lower power consumption, both important features in a laptop. Also because it is solid state it has a very stable data retention, drop an SD card and I bet the data is fine just don't try it with a hard drive.

You must remember, laptops have a limit on the size of HD you can install in them.. What i did was bought an extennal enclosure (35$) and a 120gig HD (100$) so .. $135 .. and it can be transported to ANY computer that has USB ..

Just some thought ..

Jay

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