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Ethernet External Hard Drive Enclosure
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<blockquote data-quote="cwa107" data-source="post: 1158757" data-attributes="member: 24098"><p>I think you're confused a bit about the differences between port types and that's perfectly understandable, especially considering that a bus like Firewire actually uses network protocols.</p><p></p><p>Ethernet is the physical layer of modern networking standards. To act as an Ethernet host, a drive must have be able to run a network protocol and thus it has to have some kind of operating system. NAS devices are kind of like mini servers. They can do a variety of different things as you mentioned, but the simplest NAS devices simply offer the ability to share a hard drive of some sort on a network at the maximum speeds the network is able to provide. Gigabit Ethernet is supposed to be able to operate at 1000 Megabits Per Second (keep in mind that there are 8 bits in a Byte, so in ideal conditions, that's 125MB/s). Of course with overhead on the network, you're likely not going to get those kinds of transfer rates. And if your network doesn't support Gigabit Ethernet, it's likely running at 100MB, which has a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 12.5MB/s. And again, that's in absolutely ideal conditions.</p><p></p><p>So, in short, you're not going to be able to get maximum throughput using an Ethernet interface.</p><p></p><p>Your other options are USB2 and Firewire 800. Of the two, Firewire 800 is going to be closest to being able to maximize the throughput of the drive. But that's a local bus - only the computer it's attached to will get those kinds of speeds.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="cwa107, post: 1158757, member: 24098"] I think you're confused a bit about the differences between port types and that's perfectly understandable, especially considering that a bus like Firewire actually uses network protocols. Ethernet is the physical layer of modern networking standards. To act as an Ethernet host, a drive must have be able to run a network protocol and thus it has to have some kind of operating system. NAS devices are kind of like mini servers. They can do a variety of different things as you mentioned, but the simplest NAS devices simply offer the ability to share a hard drive of some sort on a network at the maximum speeds the network is able to provide. Gigabit Ethernet is supposed to be able to operate at 1000 Megabits Per Second (keep in mind that there are 8 bits in a Byte, so in ideal conditions, that's 125MB/s). Of course with overhead on the network, you're likely not going to get those kinds of transfer rates. And if your network doesn't support Gigabit Ethernet, it's likely running at 100MB, which has a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 12.5MB/s. And again, that's in absolutely ideal conditions. So, in short, you're not going to be able to get maximum throughput using an Ethernet interface. Your other options are USB2 and Firewire 800. Of the two, Firewire 800 is going to be closest to being able to maximize the throughput of the drive. But that's a local bus - only the computer it's attached to will get those kinds of speeds. [/QUOTE]
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