Rendering off an External Drive

[snapware]

2 Quick questions about keeping my video files on an external drive:

Is there any lag associated with a USB 2.0 external drive?
Would I benefit more with a drive with a 16mb buffer vs. 8mb buffer?

[redwudz]

Not so much a lag as a transfer speed that would be slower than an internal drive. Probably in an external box, the buffer wouldn't make much difference as the limiting factor would be the USB 2.0 transfer rate. But generally, larger buffers are good. You don't really need anything faster than a 7200 RPM drive, though.

If you have a on-board SATA connection that isn't being used, you might consider a external SATA box. That would give you the same speed as an internal drive and still be portable. You can find a few enclosures with SATA and USB or FireWire combined, if you still need backwards compatibility.

Even if you don't have on-board SATA, if you have a spare PCI slot, a PCI SATA card is fairly inexpensive. Add a PCI Slot external SATA socket and you have a clean setup. You can also use one to these with your on-board SATA connection. I have 2 external drives set up this way. They are hot pluggable and have their own power supply, so no load on the computer. SATA also allows up to ~1 meter data cable, so it works fine with external boxes.

[solarfox]

I've used an external USB 2.0 drive for video projects several times. It can be made to work, you just need to think ahead a little bit about what you're going to do with it.

In my case, all of my captured footage comes either from a DV camcorder, or an analog-to-DV converter, so the transfer speed of USB 2.0 isn't a significant bottleneck. I doubt I'd be able to do an analog TV-card capture using a "lossless" codec like HuffYUV straight to the external USB drive, though.

Finished projects can also be kept on the USB drive, as it's more than fast enough to keep up with 8X DVD-R burning. (Haven't tried it with 16X, though.)