Opinions:Simpletech 2.5 External Hard Drives (1 Viewer)

[Gary_E]

I was interested if anyone has any experience with Simpletech's 2.5 external USB 2.0 hard drives. I'm interested in archiving captured HD mpegs of this season of 24 on one of their 80 gig drives.

I'm curious if HD playback performance would be impaired by connecting it to my desktop USB 2.0 port, without needing an additional power cable.

Any input would be appreciated.

Thanks,
-Gary

 

[Ken Chan]

With bus power, the problem is getting the drive to spin up. 2.5" notebook drives are not the problem that regular 3.5" drives are. I would guess that the drive basically works, otherwise they wouldn't sell it.

In that case, you've got a 5400rpm drive. HDTV MPEG transport streams are actually only about 20 Mbits/second, which any modern 5400 drive should be able to handle. (The fact that USB 2 can go as fast as 480 Mbits/second [downhill with a tailwind] doesn't matter if you can't read stuff off the drive that fast.) So you should be OK.

 

[Gary_E]

Thanks Ken! I'm going to give it a try.

-Gary