USB question

[Racket_Man]

OK here is the setup.

I have A LOT VHS video tapes that I am in the process of digitizing. The VCR is hooked into a Pinniacle box that connects to a USB 2.0 port on my PC. now since I only have a rather small 300G internal HDD in my PC that will fill up quickly, I want to stream my video directly to a USB 2.0 connected external HDD (I have currently 2 a 640G and a 1T drive that I will alternate between).

my question is is the USB bus fast enough to stream between 2 usb ports (one input and one output or will I have to stream to the internal HDD and then when finished, just copy the file over to the external drive??

I have an HP Pavillion 1730n with an AMD 4600+ 2.4Ghz duelcore processor with 2G of Ram running Win Vista.

[lordlundar]

Wouldn't push the luck myself. From time to time the sync has a tendency to go off, which can cause problems. Transferring to the internal HDD is your best bet as it has a larger pipe to accommodate it.

[MrSmiley]

You only need as much speed as you can process in realtime and store in realtime. USB 2.0 might have what you're looking for, or you could find that the bottleneck in doing this properly then moves to the CPU or BUS (depending on how it's handled, it might have to be doing the work of processing your video AND storing it over the USB device). A lot of professionals prefer Firewire (IEEE 1394) for video editing purposes, generally due to the higher bandwidth and less other devices competing for resources (sadly you can't get flashlights or hotplates powered by Firewire like you can with USB )

Also note that USB devices grow slower the more are attached to the chain/port/router/node. And finally, as with most things technical... the information below is more complicated than I have listed for a variety of reasons that scare off customers and lead to shouting matches among techs. But enough hypothetical wondering...

Speeds

• USB 1.0 (1.5Mbits/second or 0.2MB/second)
• USB 1.1 (12Mbits/second or 1.5MB/second)
• USB 2.0 (320MBits/second or 40MB/second) effectively. The USB 2.0 spec actually sets (480MBits/second or 60MB/second) as the highend but this seems to be unrealistic.
• USB 3.0 (3.2 Gbit/second or 400MB/second) effectively. The USB 3.0 spec actually sets (4.8 Gbit/s or 600MB/second) as the highend. You probably won't have USB 3.0 unless you're on the cutting edge
• Firewire 1995 (100Mbit/second or 12.5MB/second), (200Mbit/second or 25MB/second), or (400Mbit/second or 50MB/second)
• Firewire 2002 (listed as 800MBit/second or 100MB/second but actual rate will be a bit slower due to some technical issues)

Hope that helps.