external drive question 2.0 vs. 1.1

[oldnumber11]

I am looking at an external hard drive as a back up tool. My notebook only has USB 1.1 slot. I would think a USB 2.0 drive would be backward compatible, but would I suffer with slow transfer rates? I don't expect a definitive answer, but I know that most people in this forum will have an opinion. Thanks in advance for advice.

oldnumber11

[juicelooser]

Yes, any USB 2.0 hard drive will work with 1.1, it will just be extremely slow.

[kilgoretrout]

The USB 1.x top theoretical speed is 1.5MB/sec while the top theoretical speed for USB 2.0 is 60MB/sec. In practice, you can usually get about 20 to 30MB/sec with USB 2.0 and a little over 1MB/sec with USB 1.x.
It all depends how much you want to back up and how fast you want the job done. If your backing up 20GB of data, you could easily do that overnight figuring about 1GB per half hour.

[oldnumber11]

Is there a card to plug into notebook to upgrade from USB 1.1 to USB 2.0. I think there is, but I wanted to know for sure. Thanks,

[glc]

Yes, but my experience with them is pretty bad. The ones I have tried can't recognize half the stuff I plug into them.