Hi spike, How are you doing? I never used Acronis to write to CD's. However as to the speed when using HD, this depends on the type of compacting you use. The compacting algorithm takes in fact much more time than writing the compacted image later to disk. This may possibly explain why you don't see much difference. Be good, nononsense
If you are using a 2nd HD, why not "clone" instead of image? Your 5G should be copied to the new HD in about 3 minutes with no compression... maybe longer if your computer is old.
What you can do is choose the hard drive of your choice and enclose it an external enclosure available for this purpose. That way, you do not have to worry about whether a certain hard drive manufacturer has a commercially available USB/Firewire HDD of sufficient size to meet your needs. My preference is to buy these enclosures with both USB2 and firewire capabilities (see second link). here are two links : http://www.newegg.com/ProductSort/SubCategory.asp?SubCategory=92 http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?Submit=BROWSE&manufactory=1641&bop=and&page=2
My computer is 2 years old. I was not sure that cloning was good if ever i have to put back my complete system to the C drive. I know that images work perfectly, but i never tried cloning. Nononsense, i didn't compress the images at all. This should be giging the best speed, but for some reason speed is low. Perhaps due to setting of Nero 5.5 that is used apparently to write the image. PS i'm fine.
spike, I wouldn't worry too much about a few minutes longer, as long as it makes reliable backups. As you have Acronis, it may be worthwile to look for an external usb2 HD. Acronis supports these nicely and you will have a more reliable backup. Of course, DVD-CD's are handy for fyling away. Be good, nononsense
Works well. Buy a 'good' hard drive though. Look for low heat and noise on the specsheet. Reliability often goes hand in hand with these. 7000rpm will do for externals - don't forget the 8MB buffer. You should have IDE-ATA, no SATA for external usb/firewire enclosures.
Why IDE and not SATA for external enclosures? I have a couple of PCs that offers an external connections to SATA devices directly from the motherboard.
I supposed that we were talking about 'external enclosures' with usb2/firewire interfaces as described by an earlier poster. Such enclosures are can be bought empty and accept to my knowledge only IDE interface disks. Of course you could operate a SATA disk externally, as long as you can somehow run your SATA cable up to your computer. (You will have to take care of power supply as wel.)
Spike, Coming to think about it, I had this happening to me some while ago that one of my 2 CD writers at once refused to operate at high writing speed. I never discovered really why. Under linux both drives can write at top speed.
I'm lucky: the power supply connector is near to the SATA external connector as additional external plug!