Best ext hard drive interface (USB or FireWire) for MCE recording

Need a bigger HD for my MCE to record HDTV but there's no room
internally. I know FireWire is faster then USB, but I'm concerned with
waking up from sleep mode also. Anyone have any experience with this?

Cameron
Wed Mar 26 17:30:32 PDT 2008

USB 2.0 is technically faster than Fire wire (480 as opposed to 400
respectively). Fire wire supposedly uses less CPU but shares the bandwidth
with other FW devices, unlike USB. Get a HD that uses both interfaces. I got
one that uses USB, Fire Wire and eSATA. I use the FW cuz my USB ports are
full and I didn't want to risk going through a hub, and don't have eSATA at
this time. It works great, BTW, on high definition recording and playing on
my four-year old, mono-core system. So git it!

"Paul" <pauldelange7@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:33f4f454-79c9-4099-a69b-c6173e0bca12@e10g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
> Need a bigger HD for my MCE to record HDTV but there's no room
> internally. I know FireWire is faster then USB, but I'm concerned with
> waking up from sleep mode also. Anyone have any experience with this?

Paul
Wed Mar 26 19:26:35 PDT 2008

On Mar 26, 8:30=A0pm, "Cameron Snyder" <dntbt...@tellpacbell.net> wrote:
> USB 2.0 is technically faster than Fire wire (480 as opposed to 400
> respectively). Fire wire supposedly uses less CPU but shares the bandwidth=

> with other FW devices, unlike USB. Get a HD that uses both interfaces. I g=
ot
> one that uses USB, Fire Wire and eSATA. I use the FW cuz my USB ports are
> full and I didn't want to risk going through a hub, and don't have eSATA a=
t
> this time. It works great, BTW, on high definition recording and playing o=
n
> my four-year old, mono-core system. So git it!
>
> "Paul" <pauldelan...@gmail.com> wrote in message
>
> news:33f4f454-79c9-4099-a69b-c6173e0bca12@e10g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
>
>
>
> > Need a bigger HD for my MCE to record HDTV but there's no room
> > internally. I know FireWire is faster then USB, but I'm concerned with
> > waking up from sleep mode also. Anyone have any experience with this?- H=
ide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

haha - sounds good, thanks

John
Thu Mar 27 03:33:01 PDT 2008

On 27/3/08 00:30, in article uaO1GH6jIHA.3840@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl, "Cameron
Snyder" <dntbther@tellpacbell.net> wrote:

> USB 2.0 is technically faster than Fire wire (480 as opposed to 400
> respectively). Fire wire supposedly uses less CPU but shares the bandwidth
> with other FW devices, unlike USB. Get a HD that uses both interfaces. I got
> one that uses USB, Fire Wire and eSATA. I use the FW cuz my USB ports are
> full and I didn't want to risk going through a hub, and don't have eSATA at
> this time. It works great, BTW, on high definition recording and playing on
> my four-year old, mono-core system. So git it!
>
> "Paul" <pauldelange7@gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:33f4f454-79c9-4099-a69b-c6173e0bca12@e10g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
>> Need a bigger HD for my MCE to record HDTV but there's no room
>> internally. I know FireWire is faster then USB, but I'm concerned with
>> waking up from sleep mode also. Anyone have any experience with this?
>

Empirical (i.e. real world) usage has consistently shown that FireWire 400
(aka. IEEE 1394a) is faster than USB2. Besides what a lot of people forget
is that for quite some time it has also been possible to get hard disks with
FireWire 800 (aka. IEEE 1394b) interfaces and there is no way even the most
blatant anti-FireWire/pro-USB person can argue USB2 at a theoretical 480Mbps
is faster than FireWire 800 at a theoretical 800Mbps.

Without doubt however an eSATA connection would be even faster in real world
usage.

With regards to bandwidth sharing, if your computer has separate USB buses
for each socket then each socket will have 480Mbps of bandwidth. However if
you use a USB hub to connect the hard disk, then it will have to share that
480Mbps with other USB devices. The exact same thing applies to FireWire, if
each socket is on its own FireWire bus then each gets 400Mbps (or 800Mbps),
better quality PCI FireWire cards hopefully will be like this, although you
could use multiple cards. If you daisy-chain FireWire drives then they will
be sharing the bandwidth.

Sinistar
Tue Apr 08 10:46:02 PDT 2008



"Paul" wrote:

> Need a bigger HD for my MCE to record HDTV but there's no room
> internally. I know FireWire is faster then USB, but I'm concerned with
> waking up from sleep mode also. Anyone have any experience with this?
>

Sinistar
Tue Apr 08 11:07:02 PDT 2008

"Paul" wrote:

> Need a bigger HD for my MCE to record HDTV but there's no room
> internally. I know FireWire is faster then USB, but I'm concerned with
> waking up from sleep mode also. Anyone have any experience with this?


I would suggest an external drive with usb/fire/sata for flexibility..I'am
running 2 WD mybooks a 400 gig with firewire/usb(firewire connection), and a
500 gig with usb/sata(usb connection) both are connected to a XP pro server.
I have both drives mapped on 2 MCE 2005 pc's. I havent yet had a problem with
my firewire connected drive waking form sleep. BUT, the problem I do have is
when I restart the server, I loose the mapped usb drive, doesnt happen with
the firewire drive, its a pain in the rear to have to remap the drive each
time. Of course I find out it needs remapped after I'm sat down and comfy
with remote in habd. I plan to eventually to utilize the sata connection as
soon as i add a sata-pci card. Which Im sure will eliminate my problem.

SalemCat
Mon May 19 08:56:11 PDT 2008

Don't even think of using anything but eSATA. eSATA will give you an External
HD that acts exactly as if it were Internal.

The speed is amazing. Many motherboards even support hot-swapping. You can
buy a cheap eSATA Back Panel Adapter for less than $10 if you utilize an
existing SATA Port on the MB. Or buy a PCI Card for $20.

Some External eSATA HD Enclosures will come with the eSATA Back Panel
Adapter and eSATA Cable.

I reccommend the Antec MX1.

Paul
Fri May 23 07:32:46 PDT 2008

Thanks everyone.