Newbie question, re:hard drive storage

[pjpjpjpj]

I recently purchased my first HDTV, and I plan to go 100% OTA (dropping my DirecTV). I purchased an HDHomerun tuner and I am waiting on the HD Extender to come back in stock. I have an old PC that I plan on using, but I have no intention of watching TV on it, as it is pretty near the minimal specs required for SageTV, HDHomerun, and all. Basically, it will just function as a DVR. It has a fairly small internal hard drive (40 Gb).

My question is this: does anyone in my same situation (all hardware encoding, no watching on the PC) use an External USB hard drive to store their recordings? I would like to use an external 500 Gb drive (7200 rpm). Are there any problems with this, as far as delays caused by data transfer?

Thanks!

[DFranch]

I got a 500gb external USB drive for Christmas, and I've seen it record 2 HD and 3 SD streams at the same time.

[pjpjpjpj]

Originally Posted by DFranch

I got a 500gb external USB drive for Christmas, and I've seen it record 2 HD and 3 SD streams at the same time.

Beautiful. Thanks. That was what I thought, just wanted to confirm.

Now if only those extenders would be restocked..... (sigh)....