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USB 1.1 and an external DVD Drive

murphy55d

Lifer
Hey guys, a friend of mine just got an external enclosure, and a DVD-ROm. He says the playback is slow and choppy, would this be a result of only having USB 1.1? I am thinking that's the problem, but I've never seen it firsthand. I am not sure if 1.1 is fast enough to support this.

Think that is the problem?

thanks. 🙂
 
Originally posted by: murphy55d
Hey guys, a friend of mine just got an external enclosure, and a DVD-ROm. He says the playback is slow and choppy, would this be a result of only having USB 1.1? I am thinking that's the problem, but I've never seen it firsthand. I am not sure if 1.1 is fast enough to support this.

Think that is the problem?

thanks. 🙂

yes. usb1.1 = 12Mbps max for the entire bus. this means no device will be using all 12Mbps, so it's more like 8Mbps max for a single device. DVD 1x is a little over 1300 kBps, which is around 10Mbps. so, yeah. that'd be choppy. it's not even fast enough to transmit dvd 1x. you also have to take into account the adapter involved in converting the dvd which uses ATA (commonly mistakenly refered to as IDE) into USB.
 
Originally posted by: murphy55d
Thanks. That's what I suspected. 🙂

Edit: USB 2.0 IS fast enough, though, correct?

It's got a theoretical throughput of 480Mbps, but expect maybe half of that. Either way, it'll be fast enough for a DVD drive. I have a USB 2.0 hard drive enclosure, and I remember the drive in it wouldn't benchmark near what it would have been in an IDE chain, but it still gave pretty good speeds, like maybe ATA/33 level, from an ATA/100 7200rpm drive.
 
I picked up a USB2.0 Bytec encloser from Newegg. It's pretty darn quick. I use it for a hard drive, but a dvd drive would probably be just fine in there.

Your friend may need to get a PCI USB2.0 card though.
 
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