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External HDD transfer rates?

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jimstandard

Member
Joined
Dec 11, 2003
Location
Baton Rouge, La
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
 
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 ?
 
thats 480 megabits vs 133 megabyte.

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