External drive enclosures firewire or USB2

[Fluffdaddy]

Now that I got my 2nd tuner up and going with Star choice. I find that my 160GB is falling way short of my DVR needs. My HTPC box only have room for one harddrive,so External Drives is the way I'm going for now ? I have two External drive enclosures that support both firewire or USB2.
So which connection would you folks recommend using the USB2 or the firewire.

Someday after I fix that leak from the roof in the back bedroom and clear out 10 years worth of kids toys/bikes and other junk from the basement. I will build me a new htpc using one of them big fancy black HTPC enclosures with tons of room like you guys have. But for right now it's External drive enclosures

[rrussell]

Firewire! USB of any flavor relies on the CPU to do all the work (Or most of it anyway) whereas Firewire shoulders that burden itself.

I know from experience, as I originally had one of each on my HTPC, and eventually ditched the USB2 - it would bring the machine to a halt when I was having to stream lots of video.

[jominor]

Originally Posted by rrussell

Firewire! USB of any flavor relies on the CPU to do all the work (Or most of it anyway) whereas Firewire shoulders that burden itself.

I know from experience, as I originally had one of each on my HTPC, and eventually ditched the USB2 - it would bring the machine to a halt when I was having to stream lots of video.

I respectfully disagree. My Sage server has 6 USB2 enclosed drives. 3x200 for Sage recordings and 2x300 for Divx'ed movies. And I have 3 tuners(2xHauppage 250) 1 USB2 Hauppage running 24/7.

No problems.

I routine watch shows using the Sage client on my desktop, which has two USB2 (2x200) drives on it.

I've never had any problems. I have no reservations about recommending USB2.

[Fluffdaddy]

One for One............. I feared this would happen

[Opus4]

I think people have reported mixed results regarding USB2 in the past, so it _seems_ to come down to how well USB2 is implemented on the motherboard or add-in card. I don't know if firewire can have the same issue. I use USB2 for a couple tuners on one PC and firewire for an external backup drive on another PC. If the enclosure has both & you've got the ports/cables for both, I would just try one -- try copying some huge file and see what happens.

I guess things are still tied at 2-2 now?

- Andy

[Menehune]

Personally I would get the USB/Firewire combo enclosures since you can share the enclosure and drive between PCs and Macs. All of my enclosures (except for a tiny 2.5" enclosure) are combo units. I prefer using the Firewire ports on my home machine since I have a FW card and can use the sustained speeds, but on my work machine I only have USB1.1 ports.

Based on testing on my desktop machine, FW drives have a faster sustained thruput for large files than USB. Most video files are huge multi-GB files so you want fast sustained transfer speeds (how Firewire is marketed) not burst speeds (how USB is marketed).

To copy a 2GB Acronis image file using USB 2.0 took 3.5min, FW took 2.5min.

[jominor]

Originally Posted by Menehune

Personally I would get the USB/Firewire combo enclosures since you can share the enclosure and drive between PCs and Macs. All of my enclosures (except for a tiny 2.5" enclosure) are combo units. I prefer using the Firewire ports on my home machine since I have a FW card and can use the sustained speeds, but on my work machine I only have USB1.1 ports.

Based on testing on my desktop machine, FW drives have a faster sustained thruput for large files than USB. Most video files are huge multi-GB files so you want fast sustained transfer speeds (how Firewire is marketed) not burst speeds (how USB is marketed).

To copy a 2GB Acronis image file using USB 2.0 took 3.5min, FW took 2.5min.

I would add that you should consider how you use it. For example, as I stated earlier, I have 3 USB2 enclosed drives for Sage recording. I rarely, if ever, copy those files around.

I do copy files, usually 4-6 gig at a time from my main desktop to my one of my USB2 enclosed drives that holds my movies. This takes usually between 4 and 9 minutes. And this is across the network. This doesn't impact the Sage server in any detectable fashion.

I just tried copying 2 1 gig files from the internal IDE to one of my local USB2 drives. Less than 2 minutes.

I agree with Opus. The USB2 implementation surely has something to do with the performance. But as someone who has basically 6 USB2 drives, 1 USB2 encoder, 1 USB remote receiver, and 1 USB wire mouse receiver on the Sage server(that has 2 PCI encoders) and 1 USB2 drive on his main desktop, I can say that I've had no complaints, CPU spikes, or problems utilizing USB2.

My motherboard did come with 3 firewire ports, one of which I'll be using very soon for my camcorder, but I say that USB2 is more portable and for me, the better choice.

[prowler2000]

I have both Firewire and USB ports on most of my computers, but I only use USB external hard drives now. Firewire is faster, around 15 to 20% in my tests, but both are fine for the throughput needed for SageTV video. Since every computer has USB … and most now have USB 2.0, I prefer USB. If you get an external enclosure, make sure it keeps the hard drive cool. (Maybe even one with a fan if you can take the noise). I had a 200 Gig hard drive that failed due to over heating. Many external case manufactures really don’t take heat into consideration, especially the really small and cheap cases made out of plastic.

Note: Dual interface cases are the best since you can use either USB or Firewire. Nice thing about Firewire is the ability to daisy chain the cables from drive to drive.

If anyone has some case suggestions please include them here.

[jominor]

Originally Posted by prowler2000

Note: Dual interface cases are the best since you can use either USB or Firewire. Nice thing about Firewire is the ability to daisy chain the cables from drive to drive.

If anyone has some case suggestions please include them here.

The chaining is a good point. Because of the number of USB2 devices, I have two hubs on that machine with the 8 USB2 devices.

Also, I'll second the cooling point.

[Fluffdaddy]

Originally Posted by prowler2000

Note: Nice thing about Firewire is the ability to daisy chain the cables from drive to drive.

I did not know this................Thanks

[RedR]

I think the key here is a quality IDE->USB controler. A friend bought a bottom bucket discount USB 2.0 enclosure. It constantly had problems/failures with files over 2GB.

[Fluffdaddy]

Hi Guys
Is there a limit to the number of External drive firewire or USB2 enclosures before a HTPC will start to act flakey ? After adding a 3rd and much more so with a 4th External drive enclosure, my box started freezing random reboots the works. Could it be that a 200 watt PS is to small to handle all these enclosure ? Before I started adding enclosures I could go 5 or 6 weeks without a problem. Now I'm lucky to go two days. Guess it time to buy a bigger case and install all my HD's internal along with a 350+ PS
I hate having to do a HTPC rebuild because I just do not have the time...............But if I must I must. A HTPC/dvr you can not trust is not worth a bucket of cold spit

How many External drives do you have on your box ?

Thanks

[Menehune]

I think USB can have 16 devices per controller and FW can have 256 devices per controller. I think a more important question is how many of the devices are bus powered and can the unpowered hub provide enough power to run all of the bus powered devices hooked to it.

I have had problems with bus powered USB HD enclosures not starting up properly in win2k or constantly causing an XP "exceeded port power" error to appear, since the current draw was too high. I inserted a powered hub and the errors disappeared.

I have had occasional problems where the same HD would disappear or freeze the system (I'm assuming due to heat). Unplugging and letting the drive cool down seemed to fix the problem. Now I only connect the drive when I'm actively copying files to it-not leaving it connected all day long.

It sounds like you may have a power problem-inserting a powered hub may help solve the problem, rather than a rebuild of the case and replacing the PSU. Can you check the rated current on the PSU's +5v bus? Find out how much the computer draws from the 5v bus without the usb drives connected, then assume each bus powered enclosure draws 0.5A. I.e., six bus powered drives should draw at least 3A from the 5v bus. That should tell you if your 5v bus is overloaded which may be leading to reboots/funky behavior from the system.

[dbfresh23]

I'm pretty sure that USB can daisy chain up to 127 devices.

I personally downright detest USB because of it's flakeyness. I find it to have problems maintainting connectivity with things that are constantly connected, like HDD, Mouse, KB and Printer. I actually convert my mouse and kb from usb to ps2 and printer uses parallel.

Basically I think I'm suggesting that Firewire is a better route to go.

Really, my better suggestion is to use the money that you'd spend on the ext enclosure and go buy a new case and either sata or ide drive.

[jominor]

Originally Posted by dbfresh23

I'm pretty sure that USB can daisy chain up to 127 devices.

I personally downright detest USB because of it's flakeyness. I find it to have problems maintainting connectivity with things that are constantly connected, like HDD, Mouse, KB and Printer. I actually convert my mouse and kb from usb to ps2 and printer uses parallel.

Basically I think I'm suggesting that Firewire is a better route to go.

Really, my better suggestion is to use the money that you'd spend on the ext enclosure and go buy a new case and either sata or ide drive.

I've got about 7 USB2 harddrives, 1 USB2 Hauppage 250, 1 USB receiver for the Remote Wonder, 1 USB APC UPS, and a USB Wireless mouse/keyboard combo.

I have the harddrives, tuner, and UPS connected to USB2 hubs.

No problems and no hesitation recommending USB2

[Fluffdaddy]

Went out and got a powered hub last nite, but it's to early to tell.

There is an old fashion computer show this week-end and I think I'll get a big new Case.............just in case. over the years I become a newegg.com fanboy so a computer show will be fun

)