Encode or capture to USB 2.0 Drive?

[Bassman]

Hello,

Just wanted to ask if anybody has experience in outputting an Mpeg-2 file from Procoder Express to a USB 2.0 drive?

Or

Capturing DV to a USB 2.0?

I have never used them and have a few now and wanted to make sure they have enough speed before I add them to my setup.

Thanks

[Rusty]

It should work fine for DV. Mind programs running in the background that may get in the way.

[Sebastian]

You can use a test speed program to check the speed,
if everything is working correct thespeed should be
about 30 mb per sec.

Sebastian

[Philip]

Hello,

Just wanted to ask if anybody has experience in outputting an Mpeg-2 file from Procoder Express to a USB 2.0 drive?

Or

Capturing DV to a USB 2.0?

I have never used them and have a few now and wanted to make sure they have enough speed before I add them to my setup.

Thanks

I have edited entire DV projects on USB2.0 drives with no problems. Exporting an mpeg2 should be even easier to USB2.0 because the data rate is lower than DV. Heck I even author and burn my bluray discs to a USB drive.

The USB 2.0 can even work with HQ files in HD. You may bump into a few small problems with throughput but it will work. My first HD project when I got my Canon A1 cams was a 2 camera shoot (multicam) and was done on an external USB 2.0 1TB RAID 1 drive from WD. It worked pretty well but I wouldn't want to depend solely on USB 2.0 for HQ editing. If you edit in native HDV (m2t) files it would probably be fine because the data stream is equal to DV.

[STORMDAVE]

With USB2.0 drives you should be able to do 28MB/sec or so, which is more than enough for a bunch of DV layers, which are 3.6MB/sec per stream.

[Bassman]

Thanks,

I won't be editing on these drives, but wanted to ensure that capturing in and outputting would not have any glitches.

I have always heard that USB 2.0 is not the best for sustained transfer of data.

So, no problems with capture and output?

[Philip]

So, no problems with capture and output?

I have had none....especially if you are only outputting to mpg2 files for DVD. I will frequently hook up an USB drive to my old single core laptop for exporting a master of my project back to tape. I am exporting via the MPEG TS writer an HDV final master. Hasn't failed me yet. A single data stream of DV video is much smaller than what it can sustain. I really think USB has improved over the years to be fairly reliable. Not as reliable as eSATA but enough I don't worry about it.

Just an idea...if you haven't done external drives before why not just go with eSATA drives. You just need to get a few cheap brackets that plug internally into a SATA port and give you an external SATA connection. Then your external drives are true desktop speed and you have no worry about data rates.

[Bassman]

Thanks.

I have some ESATA drives as well that are used for other purposes.

The hot swap of USB 2.0 will be nice.

[GrassValley_BH]

You can hot-swap SATA too, as long as it isn't RAID-ed.

[Bassman]

Well the eSATA with my motherboard is really a bracket that plugs into the internal SATA ports.

I can not get hot swap to work.

Tech support said I needed to add AHCI support before I installed Windows to get this.

I decided I did not want to reinstall everything, so I am going to use the USB 2.0 port on the external drive for my mpeg-2 files that come out of Edius now that I have confirmed that USB 2.0 will have enough speed for dealing with mpeg-2 files.

[GrassValley_BH]

Interesting... I have NVIDIA SATA on my home desktop and Vantec EZSwap EX bays (plugged into the internal SATA ports).

Plugging in a SATA drive is just like plugging in a USB drive for me. I get the new device insertion sound, and the drive appears.

To eject it, I click on the Safely Remove tray icon, choose the drive, and then pop it out (manually).