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Thread ID: 88513 2008-03-30 09:19:00 External Hard Drive Speed somebody (208) Press F1
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654186 2008-03-30 09:19:00 I'm thinking of buying a largish external hard drive, to use with the DVB-T setup and Freeview (see my post in CK's thread).

Obviously since video is fairly data intensive, I figure that throughput is going to be an issue. I have a laptop, so internally mounting the drive is not an option.

What is the difference in real-world speed between:
- USB2.0 IDE drive
- USB2.0 SATA drive
- IEEE1394 (400) IDE drive
- IEEE1394 (400) SATA drive

Will I notice a difference between SATA and IDE, since I assume USB/Firewire will be t he bottleneck?
somebody (208)
654187 2008-03-30 09:31:00 You won't notice any real difference between any of the four options you have listed, and they should all be more than fast enough for Freeview HD. If you have Firewire 800 or eSATA ports though, get a matching drive - you'll get a pretty reasonable jump in throughput. Erayd (23)
654188 2008-03-30 09:32:00 Ok - I'm fairly sure I only have USB2.0 and a Firewire400 port.

What is the typical, real-world, sustained throughput of such a drive?
somebody (208)
654189 2008-03-30 09:36:00 Ok - I'm fairly sure I only have USB2.0 and a Firewire400 port.

What is the typical, real-world, sustained throughput of such a drive?

Firewire 400 is actually more suited to hi speed data transfer as it transfers at a sustained rate of 400Mbps where as USB only has a burst speed of 480Mbps which then dies off - hence why it is not used for video and media transfer. There are a few other factors like the read write speed at either end as well.
vitalstatistix (9182)
654190 2008-03-30 09:37:00 Ok - I'm fairly sure I only have USB2.0 and a Firewire400 port.

What is the typical, real-world, sustained throughput of such a drive?Last time I looked, on a 7200rpm Seagate Barricuda (120GB, 8MB cache) in a USB 2.0 caddy, ~40MBytes/sec. This was on a ReiserFS filesystem though; don't expect comparable performance from NTFS.
Erayd (23)
654191 2008-03-30 09:52:00 I've used my old 40gb external hdd to record dvb-t and it works perfectly fine
it uses usb2 and hdtune reports speed of around 20mb/s
which is plenty considering the HD material peaks around 10mbit/s or a little bit more

so to record real-time you'll probably have no problem
just that when you want to copy files off, in my case, would require more patience...
heni72847 (1166)
654192 2008-03-30 10:00:00 AFAIK USB has a higher sustained speed but if you are accessing many smaller files Firewire is faster b/c quicker start/stop speeds. If you are accessing fewer huge files - USB. Nomad (952)
654193 2008-03-30 10:21:00 This will tell you:

www.everythingusb.com
beeswax34 (63)
654194 2008-03-30 18:56:00 Fantastic. Thanks guys. somebody (208)
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