External HDD transfer rates?

[jimstandard]

At my work we need to use external HDD to transfer super high quality fully dome movies from our workstations to the 8 million dollar projection equipment (sorry i had to flaunt it) anyway we have the ability to use another option but i need to know how fast of a transfer i can expect from the 200gb maxtor one touch external drive on usb 2.0

[jimstandard]

i was just reading on one site that said it transferred at 480 mb/s but how can that be if regular ide drives only transfer at 133 mb/s ?

[Dc5e]

thats 480 megabits vs 133 megabyte.

480 megabits would run around <48 megabytes... so usb2.0 is a bottleneck for external drives

[jimstandard]

i thought mb/s was the same as megabyte im confused more now

[jiggamanjb]

There are 8 megabit's in a megabyte. The abbreviation for each is Mb = megabit and MB = megabyte. You just have to look how they abbreviate things, it can be tricky. So 480Mb/s = 480 / 8 = 60MB/s for that USB2 drive.

[FTC]

Hi,

If the USB2 controller is integrated into the main mobo chipset, then at most expect 34MB/sec real throughput (thats about 280 mbits/sec, even if the clock is 480mbits/sec). If your USB2 controller is in the PCI bus, then expect *at most* 27MB/sec... and this only for the faster, newer USB2 NEC controller chips.

So, in a sense, yes, this figures are a bottleneck for current ATA drives that can pull out sustained 60MB/sec in the external tracks.

Regards
FTC