Question about adding USB Drives

dsteinschneider · October 2012

I repurposed a Dell small form factor GX620 to run WHS 2011. I added two Rosewill 4 port eSATA cards (one PCI, the other PCIe). They connect to a 4 bay Probox and a bunch of Thermaltake and Rosewill drive docks. All recorded TV and ripped DVD or BD's are stored on the WHS and played across gigabit network on Win7 Mediacenter.

My question is: I didn't add some USB connected drives (SATA drives in Rosewill drive docks) to the pool because I didn't want to jeopardize performance. Could USB 2.0 connected drives negatively affect the performance of the pool? I stream Blueray ISOs stored on DrivePool from WHS (works great with MyMovies/CloneDrive/PowerDVD)

Thanks

Philmatic · October 2012

USB 2.0 is plenty fast, even for Blu-Ray ISOs.

Shane · October 2012

Unless you're going to be pulling multiple streams at once through the same USB controller you shouldn't have a problem, and in that case if you're using a mechanical drive I'd suspect it would become a bottleneck before the controller did.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Serial_Bus#Transmission_rates (480 Mbit/s, 10%-15% overhead)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc#Bit_rate (max 54 Mbit/s)

dsteinschneider · October 2012

Thanks for the answers. I never thought about the difference between max bit rate on Blu-ray vs a USB 2.0 drive. I was having issues running Blu-ray ISO's from the local drive of the HTPC we use the most. I thought it was the processor (Core Duo 2.2) and was living with the problem by pausing the movie occasionally. Then I moved the files to WHS to make room and discovered they played flawlessly and realized that something is amiss with the storage subsystem on that PC.

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