Usb hard drive kits

[IronOxide]

Anyone know about the transfer rate of files with a usb hard drive. I'm thinking about buying one of those usb to ide kits and throwing my new 120gb maxtor hard drive in one, but I don't want to if I wouldn't be able to play movies very well from it. Anybody out there have a external hard drive have any problems playing mp3's or divx/xvid movies off of their drive? Thanks.

 

[jazzhound]

Most enclosures I've seen are USB 2.0 so if your motherboard supports it, you can get up to 480Mb/sec transfers. If not, try looking for one with firewire which is 400Mb/sec. I can't remember how fast USB 1.1 is, but it may not be sufficient for streaming movies.

 

[thorin]

Theoretical maxes:

USB 1.1 = 12Mb/sec = 1.5MB/Sec
USB 2.0 = 480Mb/sec = 60MB/sec
FW400 (IEEE1394) = 400Mb/sec = 50MB/Sec
FW800 (IEEE1394b) = 800Mb/Sec = 100MB/Sec

Well I'd be surprised to find out that anyone has trouble playing MP3s from a USB or Firewire drive since at BEST a mp3 is encoded @ 320Kb/sec (0.320Mb/Sec or approx 1/38th the max bandwidth of USB 1.1). For Divx lets assume a movie length of 2hrs, audio bitrate of 128Kb/sec and a average filesize of 680MB that gives us a Divx4 bitrate of approx. 664Kb/sec (about 1/18th the max bandwidth of USB1.1).

Edit: Someone check my math....it's early and I haven't even finished my coffee.

Thorin