External Hard Drive Transfer Rates

I am looking for a wireless hard drive, ~+1TB as an extension of my laptop and wife’s laptop. I use to have one (don’t recall what brand) a few years ago but scrapped it since the transfer speeds were agonizingly slow.

I have been looking at the one below but the reviews don’t look that great (I would probably purchase it from a newegg, frys, etc. type place).

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Western...lack/1261572.p?id=1218244147150&skuId=1261572

Anyone have any suggestions?

Thank you

 

You said you were looking for a wireless hard drive. The link you provided has only an Ethernet connection. It means you would need to plug in a RJ45 cord into it.

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Drive Connectivity: Ethernet
Data Transfer Rate to/from Interface: Up to 1000 MBps
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I was under the impression that I plugged it in to my wireless router and accessed the hard drive from there. Is this not accurate?

It says the transfer rate is up to 1000mbs but I am not sure the typical transfer rate would be.

The issue with my last one was that it was far to slow so I was wondering if anyone has had any experience with them.

 

Oh okay. Yes that will work. The 1000 Mbps is only from the disk drive to your wireless router. It's the gigabit Ethernet speed. But from your wireless router to your laptop and your wife's laptop, it is much slower.


If you have a wireless G router, the maximum speed is 54 Mbps. If you have the newer wireless N router, the theoretical maximum is 300 Mbps.

Those numbers are theorectical. In reality can almost never be achieved. The farther away you are from the wireless router, the slower the speed. Multiple devices also share this bandwidth.

These wireless disk drives can be very slow compared to plugging a disk directly to your computer (e.g. via USB). Depend on how you want to use them, it may or may not be acceptable.

 

As long as your router has a USB port, that should work. That's what I did with my latest router and it's nice. Just check your router's manual to make sure.

To be clear though, you aren't looking for a wireless hard drive. You just need an external hard drive that can connect to your router (and in turn creating a networked hard drive accessible through your router).

You can create the same thing w/ an external hard drive connected to a computer and then shared over your network. The catch here is that the computer it is connected to must be on for other computers to see it.

 

Although this is admittedly unscientific, avoid western digital. I've had failures with WD drives. I've never had a failure with a seagate drive. If you want speed, make sure you get USB 3.0. It's blazing fast, even if you have a USB 2.0 port.

 

Windows 7 has a "Home Group" feature. Fairly easy to use. If you have a USB (or internal) disk drive hooked up to it, you can create a Home Group and share that disk drive with other computers running Windows 7.

 

Thanks everyone for your input.