USB

[Tom]

I need a portable hard drive that will work on XP.
All I can find is USB 3.0 and almost everything is at least a terabyte.
Can XP handle that large a drive?

And USB is supposed to be backward compatible....I searched Google and it should be no problem, but can anyone confirm they have used 3.0 with 2.0 computers?

[FocusWiz]

I need a portable hard drive that will work on XP.
All I can find is USB 3.0 and almost everything is at least a terabyte.
Can XP handle that large a drive?

And USB is supposed to be backward compatible....I searched Google and it should be no problem, but can anyone confirm they have used 3.0 with 2.0 computers?If memory serves me correctly, I believe that Windows XP SP3 will work with a Terabyte Drive withouit any issue. On the machine I upgraded to Windows 7, I had twin 300MB System Drives and a 1 Terabyte drive I used for data. However, I did have it partitioned such that there was a separate partition for the Swap space.

This link seems to indicate that you can go even higher than that if you use a third party product.

http://www.ghacks.net/2010/11/04/how-to-use-3tb-hard-drives-on-windows-xp/

I cannot answer from experience for the USB 3.0 vs 2.0 usage, but as I recall, the USB 3.0 drive should give best performance with a 3.0 port, but should be backwards compatible (though slower than ratings would suggest) when using a 2.0 port.

[Tom]

Great!

Thanks Focus!

[JustCoolGene]

Tom,

I use Western Digital 1 tb Elements portable hard drive and it is my choice to sell to my customers. It is backward compatible to USB 2.0 and runs on all XP machines. It is a great drive for about $60.00. You can use 2tb or more for under $100.00. Very dependable. What a great external USB drive. I suggest you buy it. You won't be disapointed.

Gene

[wilderness]

FWIW, I've a 1 tera (internal) on an XP Machine with SP2 and it works fine, although the tera is used as a secondary drive.

Same tera was previously on an XP 64 machine.

I've a 64GB USB flash drive (2.0) that is slow as hell on both machines. Large data transfers take forever.