Burning DVDs over USB2?

the old 80gb ide drive in my "main usage" pc is dying, so i may as well spend the extra few bucks and get a 200gb or something

a usb2 drive would be useful to me, as i could put stuff on it for the tv computer. i was thinking a 3.5" sata drive in a usb2 enclosure

however, i'd also want to burn dvds (movies and ps2 games) from it. does anyone here burn from usb2 drive to ide dvd? or to a usb2 burner?

i know the spec says hi-speed 2 has enough bandwidth, but usb also has overheads, tho hopefully not that much. just thought i'd check

Super Jamie

the old 80gb ide drive in my "main usage" pc is dying, so i may as well spend the extra few bucks and get a 200gb or something

a usb2 drive would be useful to me, as i could put stuff on it for the tv computer. i was thinking a 3.5" sata drive in a usb2 enclosure

however, i'd also want to burn dvds (movies and ps2 games) from it. does anyone here burn from usb2 drive to ide dvd? or to a usb2 burner?

i know the spec says hi-speed 2 has enough bandwidth, but usb also has overheads, tho hopefully not that much. just thought i'd check

Click to expand...

It should be okay, presuming your computer ain't too bad.

got it friday. seagate 200gb and laser usb2 housing. it's slow as. like less than 1mb/sec. might ebay the case and get a pci sata card

What's limiting the speed? Is it your CPU or the USB2 (I'd imagine it would be the CPU, the process isn't likely to be I/O bound).

An easy way to tell is to open up Windows Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del) whilst you're burning and check the CPU usage of whatever you're using to burn the DVD (nero.exe for Nero Burning ROM). If the CPU usage of that program is high and remains high all the way through the burn then the burning is CPU bound, not I/O bound. If the CPU usage of that process is low and remains relatively low throughout then the process is I/O bound.

Also, whenever you're asking for tech help or advice such as this, remember to post your system specs and give as much information as possible

Super Jamie

got it friday. seagate 200gb and laser usb2 housing. it's slow as. like less than 1mb/sec. might ebay the case and get a pci sata card

Click to expand...

That sounds like I/O limited to me. USB2's average trasfer rate is about 900 kbps, so just under 1 mbps in my experience.

skip0110

That sounds like I/O limited to me. USB2's average trasfer rate is about 900 kbps, so just under 1 mbps in my experience.

Click to expand...

Erm...I regularly transfer files to and from an external USB2 enclosure and my internal hard drives at 10-11 MB/sec (roughly 10,000-11,000 KB).

You sure you're not thinking of USB1.1?

amp88

Erm...I regularly transfer files to and from an external USB2 enclosure and my internal hard drives at 10-11 MB/sec (roughly 10,000-11,000 KB).

You sure you're not thinking of USB1.1?

Click to expand...

Maybe?

Those were definitely the speeds I was seeing, and Windows never gave me a "plug that thing into a USB2 port, dumbarse!" warning...

Ok, just burnt a full (4469MB) DVD-ROM there from files on my USB2 external enclosure. Took 6 minutes, 52 seconds and used 12 seconds of CPU time on my system. The average data transfer rate of the burn was 10.85MB/sec (although in reality the average would have been higher than this as the total time Nero reports includes the lead-in and lead-out time. The real average would probably be in the region of 11MB/sec or slightly more). I burned the DVD at 12x (my burner is capable of 16x (Pioneer DVR-108) but I don't really see the point in paying more just to have a slightly quicker burn), but remember that due to the way the DVD is burnt, part of the data will be burnt at 4x, part at 8x and part at 12x. This means that the maximum transfer rate during the burn was probably something like 13MB/sec.

Ok, so back to the topic...it really seems to me like either Super_Jamie's PC doesn't have any USB2 ports (or for some reason the USB2 ports have been throttled back to USB1.1), or that the CPU is so slow that it's holding things back very, very badly.

Pertinent information on my system:

Athlon 2700+ @2.17GHz
1GB Corsair DDR333
ASUS A7N8X-D
Pioneer DVR-108
Cheap (and I mean cheap) USB2.0 external enclosure
200GB Western Digital 7200rpm 8MB cache HDD (in USB2.0 enclosure)

@ skip0110: It must have been USB1.1 you were getting a transfer rate of ~1MB/sec on. Remember USB1.1's maximum bandwidth is 13Mbps