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XP: Firewire harddrive slow file transfers.

S

skoka

Member
Hello,

I have an external firewire harddisk that is connected to an XP machine. The partition on which XP is loaded has 3.5GB free disk space. I have lots of video files in DV format on the firewire harddisk. Most of the files are around 1.3GB each. When I try to open the files through windows media player, it takes about three minutes to open the video file.

I am assuming the file is getting copied to the local disk and then being played from there. If this is true, it should still takes less than 30 seconds to transfer the whole file or may be minute at the most. (1300/50 = 26 seconds).

The same file if I play from my other PC that has XP on it, the file is played instantaneously. So there is something that I don't know that is causing the whole file to be copied to the disk.

Any idea what's going wrong?
 
I have a firewire cdrw & I play the movies burned to cd just fine. Nothing special, XP on laptop with pcmcia firewire card.
I have also burned images across the lan as well. It seems to handle it well.

FYI
 
I don't know what brand of firewire HD you're using, but the old generation bridge in firewire external HD can only sustain around 12 MBps.
 
I am using a maxtor 80GB 5400rpm drive in an ADS firewire enclosure. It should in theory do 400mb/sec (50MB/s).

But the major question is how to play straight off the drive and not copy to the c: drive first.
 


<< It should in theory do 400mb/sec (50MB/s). >>



No it should not. That is the full bandwidth of the 1394 bus, which is not taking into accout the actual performance of
the drive attached to it. The highest sustained transfer rate for that drive is around 30MB/s, and the average is
closer to 25. That is also not taking into account where and how it is writing that data to your hard drive during
the transfer. You didn't say what type of drive XP is installed on, but I'd guess the file is being written to the
far end (slower part) of the partition, which will also affect how fast the file can be transferred.

What do you have set in the options for media player as far as buffering and DV settings?


 
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