I was too curious and broke the seal. Will actually try to use it, probably for the rare full /home backup every 2 or 3 years, since it needs external power and is probably not that fast. I’d date this artifact late 2000s? It might have USB 2, making it fast enough.
Weird though that I’d buy this and forget about it forever. It definitely cost enough to matter to me back then.
I remember seeing IDE drives all the way up to 1TB. Anything over 80GB was pretty uncommon though.
I had some 320GB IDE drives in my nForce2 chipset Socket A system, which thanks to the southbridge used on the motherboard, I had USB2.0 but no SATA support.
You could have gotten a sata enclosure and had faster speeds over USB 2.0 lol but if I remember correctly, back then the first released sata enclosures were like $100.
USB2.0 is considerably slower than an internal IDE drive. USB 2.0 is 480 megabit/s, and the final generation ATA 133 spec is 133 megabyte/s, which is around 1065 megabit/s, so over twice as fast. Ditto for things like latency. While the hard drives of the time physically couldn’t saturate a PATA connection, the difference in speed was still easily noticed.
At the time, if you wanted a fast external drive you used Firewire, which I actually did. I had several drives that were Firewire 800 but also included USB2.0 to connect to computers that lacked Firewire. I don’t recall if any of my motherboards that have Firewire built in can boot off of it but I kind of doubt it.
Later we had eSata for a brief period of time. I still miss it as it’s not as fast as USB3.0 which is the only option even today on many new external drives.
Theoretically yes, but most sata drives were faster than ide drives. So it ends up being a wash really…USB 2.0 being the bottle neck and ide drive speed and it not being able to completely hit ATA133s transfer rate really. I still bet that while on paper the IDE looks faster, it’ll be slower in real world.