External USB Drives.

[broderp]

Can I put a Western Digital MYBOOK (500GB) on my PC and use it as a primary drive for my video files?

Best Buy has the MY BOOK ESSENTIAL EDITION for $180, (the best price for an INTERNAL drive I have found is $169).

Is it a go or are there any drawbacks?


Thanks.


PS. I searched USB HARD DRIVES on the forum but found nothing.

[BarkOLounger]

My experience is as long as your PC is USB 2.0 you should be fine (I know the HD it 2.0).

I have a number of external USB (4) and Firewire drives (2) that hold my recorded TV and DVDs and the throughput has always been fine. I would strongly recommend that you not use a USB hub if you decide to add more drives later.

I have one USB 500 GB and one 400 GB that are plugged into a pair of USB ports that plug to the same USB connection on my motherboard and they have worked great for over a year. I've found this to be a very cheap way to more space (of course if a drive fails I will lose data).

I don't do any HD though, so that may change things a bit.

[hemicuda]

I too would agree that USB2 should handle videos. I remember hearing that internal limitations prevent drives from sustaining data rates anywhere near what the external interface is capable.

From my experiences and others on the board you may be taking your life in your own hands, so to speak. WD releases lately have not been near the quality they used to produce. I've started planning the replacement of all my WD drives purchased in the last couple of years. I've had one fail this year and haven't heard any comments to prop up their rep. There's a good reason why they quit doing the 3yr/5yr warranties on the majority of their products.

[stevech]

I store all my SageTV videos on 3 external USB2 drives. All are $25 USB enclosures in which I put whatever drives were on sale - like 250GB and 160GB. These all connect to a USB2 hub (external) and that goes to a laptop that runs SageTV and has an S-video output. It's quiet. Laptop isn't very fast, but all of this works fine for standard-def TV. Laptop uses WiFi for Internet connectivity as I can't get CAT5 to where it is.

I've always purchased Western DIgital drives, but of late, I also use Hitachi. I think they're now all made in random factories and so Q/A is hit-and-miss. Hard drives are now like tomatoes.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by broderp

Can I put a Western Digital MYBOOK (500GB) on my PC and use it as a primary drive for my video files?

Best Buy has the MY BOOK ESSENTIAL EDITION for $180, (the best price for an INTERNAL drive I have found is $169).

Is it a go or are there any drawbacks?


Thanks.


PS. I searched USB HARD DRIVES on the forum but found nothing.

You can get 500GB Seagate (internal) drives for <$150 on newegg:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...k=&srchInDesc=

[geogecko]

I've been buying the WD 500GB drives for around $130 for the last month or so (check pricegrabber).

I bought one and put it inside a Vantec NexStar3, which has eSATA and USB2. I use it for archiving camcorder home movies, and images of both my HTPC and Study computer. I wanted to go this route, since eSATA is the fastest, (got another PCI-eSATA adapter on the way for the other computer), plus it allows me to backup, then remove power and connections, in the rare event that there is some kind of power surge that destroys both computers. I was storing images on the opposite computer, but my 1G network, doesn't appear to be working correctly, and I only appear to be getting around 100M speeds right now. Transferring a file that was 30GB over that network was painful.

[litkaj]

When I first built a SageTV system I was using external USB 2.0 drives to store imported videos that I had ripped from DVDs and converted to XviD.

Unfortunately, when playing media from those drives I ended up with files that either quickly lost sync between the audio and video or that skipped every 30 seconds or so. Those same files, moved to an internal drive, worked just fine.

[geogecko]

It could be that one of the interrups used by the USB ports was shared with a high usage device, like a video card or something. This caused hickups in my system when the GPU was on the same interrupt as one of my FusionHDTV PCI cards.

480Mb/sec should be more than enough bandwidth for just about any video I can think of.

[broderp]

Thanks for the thoughts.

I returned the WD 500GB Hard drive (1 YR Warranty) and replaced it with a Seagate 500GB Internal Drive (5 YR Warranty)

This was a "fun" weekend project, as I completely re-did my SageTV box, from a 100% clean install, with the only "old" part being a cut-&-paste of the RC commands from my old SAGE.PROPERTIES file into my new one and channel icons.

I also bought and installed ACRONIS TRUE image and made several FULL backups, at various points, JUST IN CASE .

I fine way to blow a weekend!

[hemicuda]

I feel your pain. I did the same thing last month. Gave me an excuse to add a 400gb sata & usb to the system though.

[geogecko]

Yeah, I like Acronis TI. It's nice that you don't "have" to restore the image, but you can browse it like it was a real hard drive, just in case, you have to upgrade your motherboard or something, and the image isn't compatible with your system anymore, you can still get critical files copied over.

I used to do the full backups at various points of installation, but found that if I had to go back, I'd just basically start over, because I'm sure there would be a driver update, etc, since the last time I did those backups.

It's a time sink, no matter how you look at it.

I think the WD 500 is quieter than the Seagate, but it may not matter in your case. I've had decent luck with the 500GB WD's that I've got (3 of them), and the Samsung 160, and 2 Samsung 250's.

[stevech]

I tested the relative performance of USB2 and SATA on an AMD4200. Tested with 64K and 4K blocks.

A cheap SATA drive was 3 to 4 times the speed of a USB2 drive, due I suppose to the USB2 speed and overhead. Speed seemed unaffected by one added hub.
I've read that the PATA drives are no faster than SATA, in transfer rate. Of course, all of this is constrained by seek time which is the same for both.

So the USB2 speed seemed OK for light use, say, standard def record and playback simultaneously. But for HD, you'd want to avoid it, I'd think.

noise
WD 250GB drive I bought was way too noisy - rotating motor noise, not seek noise. I exchanged it. Same problem.
Samsung SP2504C drive in a Buffalo USB2 box - just as noisy. Have to put it on foam on my desk else it sounds like a dentist's office.

They need to mount these with sound isolation if they insist on selling this stuff.
May have to do with low price = more platters = more noise, whereas higher price = higher density = fewer platters = less noise. Guessing.

[hemicuda]

I can't hear any of my drives except for the seagate usb but only when it comes out of standby. Acronis is nice, yes. I'm not going to recommend the Secure Zone for backups though. After about a month of differential backups I got an error that the Zone was full. My readings of the manual indicate that it's supposed to delete the old full/diff files and start over. Didn't happen. I've since set up a folder on the usb drive and backup to that. It allows more flexible backup options; how often and how many to keep. my $.01 worth.

[geogecko]

Hmm, I must have an older version of Acronis TI (I think 8.0), as I don't have that feature. I just do what you are doing.

As far as USB2 and HD, if USB2 HD tuners exist, then why shouldn't it be able to write that to a USB2 hard drive? I'm not sure why anyone would really do that, all my drives are in a hard drive enclosure (no air flow) with large heat sinks mounted to the sides of the case, and a multilane cable going from that case to the HTPC.

The Samsung 160GB drives were supposed to be the quietest drives, but the 250GB were louder. I bought the WD 500GB's, because SPCR (www.silentPCreview.com) recommended them. They seem louder than the Samsung 160GB drives, but it's worth the added capacity, plus my drives are in an enclosure.

[stevech]

With Acronis TruImage Home, I have it backup once a day with an incremental. So after 7 days it has one full and 6 deltas.

Once a week I move this week's files to a folder, clobbering the prior weeks.

Now Acronis starts anew, for the coming week.

There may be a way to automate the rolling backup, but I haven't found it.

I don't go more than a week with incrementals.

This is all just for the boot disk; I don't have a practical means to backup the video disks, hence my intent to setup a RAID-1 with two 500GB drives.
-----------------

Anyway, this has drifted from the main subject: RAID and my earlier comment about how USB2 drives are far slower than SATA or PATA direct.

[Lucas]

Another aspect of using external drives for 24x7 SageTV storage that I have not seen discussed is the temperature of the drives. While some external enclosures have fans for cooling the drive, several don't. This means that the drive gets hotter thus reducing(most likely) its life expectancy. This may not matter that much if the PC and drive are ON for 4-5 hours per day, but if they are ON for 24x7 the drive may get pretty hot.

It was one of the reasons I moved several drives from my SageTV HTPC to a NAS server which is well ventilated.

The drive temps in the SageTV box were between 50-60 Celcius whereas in the Server they are around 30-32 Celcius.

[stevech]

Also, I don't think that Win XP spins-down USB2 drives due to inactivity as it does for PATA (and SATA?)

[hemicuda]

my usb2 seagate spins down all the time. makes emptying the recycle bin a bit slow as it has to spin up before the dialog appears. no clue where, if any, the settings are for that. My Apricorn 40gb does not spin down however.