In practice how long will it take an external USB2 or 1394 hard disc to back
up 9G of mixed data, (programs and associated data) ? The USB external HDD
is given as 480 Mbits/sec. and the 1394 HDD is given as 400 Mbits/sec.
Dan.
Those rates you list are only theoretical max rates of the bus iteself,
not the realized rates of the device under specific uses.
Either might write at (VERY rough figure) 15MB/s. Doing that math that
comes out to about 10 minutes, but due to a variety of other factor it may
take longer, perhaps around 12-15 minutes. With configuration problems or
other use of the system it could take quite a bit longer, I can't even
pretend that (12-15 min.) figure is remotely accurate, but it's about what
I'd expect before trying a specific system/configuration.
Of course there are ways to use your computer to accelerate this, like
using compressed archives, so while you have 9 GB of source data, less is
being written to the destination in compressed form.
