What is the diff in mb/s or rpm

[lukas_01]

hi i wants to get myself a external hardrive i am not sure what to look for some drives say 480mb/s and others 7200rpm .what must i look for to get a external drive with a good transfer rate for home use with my mede8er media player can you help me please kind regards

 

[nikorr]

7200rpm HDD spins inside 7200x a minute and is faster than 5400rpm.
7200 is better for operating system than 5400rpm HDD.

Example: OCZ Vertex 2 SSD 480MB/s write and 550MB/s read SSD are not spinning inside,. so they are advertised in the transfer speed in MB. In this case it can write/download in theoretical speed of 480MB/s and read in up to 550MB/s.

SSD's are the best for the OS, HDD don't compare to SSD at all in the speed, but SSD don't compare to HDD in the storage capacity.

 

[Dereck47]

Mb/s (or Mbps) means Megabit per second. A Megabit is one million bits. It’s the transmission speed of a data transfer.

480Mb/s means that the external hard drive can transfer data to and from your pc at 60MB/s.

Note: Mb (Lower-case b) means Megabit and MB (Capital B) means Megabyte.

RPM means revolutions per minute. 7200rpm means that the platter inside the hard drive spins 7,200 times in 60 seconds.

The higher the rpm a hard drive has, the faster it spins, and the faster it spins, the more MB/s can be read or written to the drive.

I believe one of the fastest external hard drives out now is the Western Digital My Book 3.0, but you need a USB 3.0 port on your pc to get maximum performance.