Do not stack external drives on top of each other
 

I just figured something out:

External drives should not be stacked one on top of the other.

I have 3 of them on my desk and have been copying data from one to the other all day. I was amazed at how slow the transfers were, only 12MB/s.

After awhile i began to wonder if vibration from the one on the bottom could be making it more difficult for the one on top to track and vice-versa, so I unstacked them and the write speed shot up to 20MB/s immediately and has been in the mid 20's since.

Stupid thing to be just figuring out, they look so cool stacked up, but they work much better if they are not.

was it the vibration or the heat?

I cant afford enough external drives to be able to stack them ontop of each other :(

http://images17.newegg.com/is/image/...112-TS?$S300W$

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-112-_-Product

:thumbsup

Definitely vibration. Of the two in question, one is a western digital "elements" 2 terabyte drive and it's laying down flat.

The other is the older "Mybook" 2 terabyte drive and it was standing up like a book on top. So there was not enough surface touching to carry any heat. Plus there are little feet on them to allow air between and they are barely lukewarm to the touch.

Since the mybook is older I expected the write speed to be a bit slower, I am not even sure it's SATA inside there, could be an ATA drive, but even back in the day when ATA was standard I got better than 12MB/s off of my external drives with USB2, so I know something was up.

I put my hand on it and felt a lot of vibration and thought "what if that's affecting the read/write head?" It appears that it was.

These are the best. I've got at least 5 of them stuffed with drives.

They are sweet, I also bought 40 of these to protect my content backups:

http://www.wiebetech.com/fonts/thumb...3.5_closed.jpg

http://www.wiebetech.com/products/cases.php

Beats the hell out of looking for power cords and cables all the time :winkwink:

they have pretty good products for hard drives...

I have one of these--they're great.