On Sat, 23 Apr 2011 06:46:28 -0500, "HeyBub" wrote:

Ralph Mowery wrote:

With the price of external hard drives going from about $ 50 to $ 80
for a 500 GB to 1K GB, it is even cheaper to buy them new. Also you
just plug them into the usb port.
I still like the dvds for the important stuff. Guess that I am one
of those that make several backups.

I have two USB drives. I back up my laptop to one weekly, then copy that to
the other when I get around to it (probably every three months).

True. The downside is that USB drives are pitifully slow compared to an
internal drive, 480Mbps vs. 6Gbps. An internal SATA drive has roughly twelve
times the transfer rate of a USB drive.

The difference is not that great. The sustained transfer rate to the drive is
nowhere near 6Gbps (more like 1Gbps for the fastest drives on the market).

In any case, it's several orders of magnitude faster than DVD.