External USB/eSata HDD - HD playback?

[skyeclad]

Has anyone had luck with using an external USB2.0 or eSata HDD for recording and playback of HD format material? I was considering getting a smaller HDD for another purpose and I just thought that if it works I might get a slightly larger one and use it as a back-up in case I run out of space for my main internal SATA drive.

[fyodor]

I've used USB drives successfully for a while for HD recording and playback. As for ESATA, I don't see how it would be an issue. As far as I know, the motherboard doesn't really know if it's an internal or external SATA drive. It's just an issue of where the hard drive is physically located.

Originally Posted by skyeclad

Has anyone had luck with using an external USB2.0 or eSata HDD for recording and playback of HD format material? I was considering getting a smaller HDD for another purpose and I just thought that if it works I might get a slightly larger one and use it as a back-up in case I run out of space for my main internal SATA drive.

[NEOSG]

I use a few different connection types for external drives, all without any problems.

[skyeclad]

Really? I would have thought that the USB interface would not be sufficient sustained bandwidth for HD video. That makes me want to consider getting one.

[Djc208]

Picked up a Seagate 500 GB USB2 drive yesterday ($99 at Office Depot) for Sage recordings (and backup). Recorded House in HD last night, no problems with playback. Even had comskip running on the drive at the same time (once I realized I had to add the new drive for monitoring) and no hickups.

[skyeclad]

Originally Posted by Djc208

Picked up a Seagate 500 GB USB2 drive yesterday ($99 at Office Depot) for Sage recordings (and backup). Recorded House in HD last night, no problems with playback. Even had comskip running on the drive at the same time (once I realized I had to add the new drive for monitoring) and no hickups.

I picked up a Maxtor One Touch 4 USB at Staples, I think it was $80 AR. I haven't tried it yet but I'm optimistic that it will work based on this thread. I'll probably give it a test tonight.

[DFranch]

I am thinking of getting a Maxtor one touch 500gb USB drive too ($129). I have 2 HD tuners and 3 SD tuners, I am concerned that it will not be able to handle that kind of load. Does anybody have a similarly loaded system who can comment?

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by skyeclad

Really? I would have thought that the USB interface would not be sufficient sustained bandwidth for HD video.

Why would you think that? USB 2.0 bandwidth is 60 MB/s. Typical HD bandwidth is around 7 GB/hour or 2 MB/s. Plenty of headroom there.

[DFranch]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

Why would you think that? USB 2.0 bandwidth is 60 MB/s. Typical HD bandwidth is around 7 GB/hour or 2 MB/s. Plenty of headroom there.

That makes sense. 7 gb/hour is = 7000 mb / 60 min / 60 sec which is only 2 mb/sec. That means that if all 5 of my tuners were recording to the drive and I was watching from the drive as well I should have no problem.

[GKusnick]

Well, there's still the question of whether the disk itself can transfer data that fast. On my Seagate USB drive I measure transfer rates of about 30 MB/s. Then too there's seek time to consider when dealing with multiple streams. Recording multiple streams at once shouldn't be too much of an issue, assuming 64K clusters, since all the writing will tend to happen in more or less the same part of the disk. But adding in a playback stream from a different part of the disk will increase the amount of seeking needed and slow things down a bit.

Basically the point is that the USB interface isn't the limiting factor.

[hufnagel]

Over the past couple of months I've been migrating my collection of video files off my 2.5TB storage server and on to individual HDDs, with each drive in seperate USB2.0 cases. I use them exclusively for playback only. So far I've had 3 running simultaneously, playing different streams to different MVPs, without any playback issues.

Take the above for what it is, but it seems to me that so far USB2.0 for playback is perfectly fine.