External Hard Drive Question.

[mavinx]

Hi, im new to all this ripping and experience. I have alot of question concerning this topic. One of the main ones is, will dvd files saved in an external hard drive be burnt slower than if they were in the internal pc drive. Can someone recomend a good external drive thats fast and reliable, or is this external drive method just not gonna work out? thanks for the help guys.

[Gary D]

With an external hard drive, you are limited in the speed of the data transfer by either the USB or firewire. Both require the CPU.

Personally, I store movies on my external hard drive. When it comes time to burn, I transfer/copy them to my internal drive and then burn.

Here is a good read on DMA settings by blutach and others

http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=44808

http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=43070

[Gary D]

BTW mavinx:

[NightTran]

I burn to an iso to C drive then burn to disc after

[mavinx]

BTW mavinx:

Thanx for the help and the welcome, u'll be seeing alot of me around here, lol, like i said, im a newbie with plenty of questions, thanks alot

[Chewy]

I played around with transfers from and to external drives a while back,
using the cheaper older enclosures I got 10-12 MB/s transfers with USB2 and
20-23MB/s with firewire. New chipsets are getting usb2 to catch firewire.
A 4x burn with dvd is 5.5MB/s, 8x is 11MB/s.

[bmp956]

USB2 surpasses Firewire

I'm also gonna add an external hd and from what I've seen of the specs on these Firewire transfers at 400 mb (max) and USB2 at 480. I'm sure they are mostly perfect fantasy conditions, but faster is faster, right.
Also, thanks Chewy for your advise awhile back concerning adding another burner and same cable issues. Since I had already ordered the internal drive I simply picked up a nice cheap external enclosure for $22. Been working like a champ since the install with USB2, for some reason with the Firewire connection it was intermittent being recognized by the computer. Oh well, no biggie as I have plenty of USB connections left. Great perfomance at half the price of an external drive. Don't know if its worth going that route for a harddrive though.

[johndoh453]

I have a large hard drive and partition it so that i can have a partition for ripped movies.