Data Transfer Rate of External Hard Drive

I am just wondering as i hopefully plan on getting an external hard drive so i am wondering if i can use this ok to burn things onto and internal (or possibly external) DVD writer.

So before i buy i just would like to know if it is possibe but i am getting lost with all these aspects surrounding it.

So from reading about and some help i have recieved i have found that an internal hard drive transfers at a rate of 133MB/s whereas an extranal hard drive transfers at 480Mb/s (which equates to 60MB/s) thats under half the speed so can i ask does anyone know the data transfer rate of burning a DVD from a hard drive at 4x DVD speed (not 4x CD speed). As it would need to be considerably under 60 MB/s for it to function properly.

Also can i ask does external drives use up more memory than internal as i assume there would need to be a lot of memory used in the burning buffer/cache. So if the external drive used up more memory would that make burning more risky. Like i say i am getting confused on the matter but i have made very expensive mistakes in the past because of lack of knowledge so i want to make sure i can achieve what i want before i purchase

Thank you for your help

 

Hi Anthony1uk,

I image my laptop to an external HD (Seagate/USB20/200GB). From there, I plug the external HD into a desktop and burn the images to DVD directly. That's at 4x and 8X. It would burn quicker if I copied the image file to one of the internal HDs, but for me the slightly faster burn does not justify the extra steps of moving files around. I have not timed the transfers lately, but a rough estimate would be ~25% slower when using the external drive as the source. I test all my burned images and have never had a bad burn.

As far as memory goes, I see no impact on resources with an external HD connected.

Hope that helps.

Nick

 

Hey nick! Remember me? In relation to the question.... I think the memory buffer would be related to the burning software you use and either set by they software automatically or manually by you through an advanced setting. I think a higher memory buffer would be better because obviously RAM is faster than virtual memory which is what would be used if you set a low memory buffer. Thus resulting in a buffer underflow where the data cannot transfer to the burner fast enough and eventually a failed disc. One thing I can definitely not recommend to you though is burning from an external drive to an external burner. The reason for this would most likely be the bus pipeline. I know on Intel chipsets they hook the USB and PCI host controllers together at least in the past. We all know that when hardware shares resources you can get low performance, compatability problems among other things.

HTH

 

To get data to a CD burning at 52x you only need an average data rate of approximatly 7.5MB/s and for a DVD at 16x you're looking for about 21.6MB/s
A DVD
The real variable as to whether or not this will be viable for you is more about the rest of your system and config than it is about what the burner / HDD are capable of.
If you can get one like you want to buy to test with first then go for it and then you'll know for sure