External USB 3.0 drive for post-capture video work?
 

Given a separate XP capture PC and a Windows 7 Core i7 PC to be used for everything else:

After transfer of captured video (to AVI) to an external USB 3.0 hard drive, can the post capture work (restoration, filtering, editing, encoding, etc.) be accomplished from the Win7 machine and the external drive with the file remaining in that drive. Or does that cause problems and is it better to transfer captures to the internal drive?

As long as you are not capturing to the external drive you should be fine. Your transfer speeds may not be the full USB3 speeds if your system is older with USB2 ports.

Erich

Thank you, Erich. Yes, would use the external at USB 2.0 speed only to transfer from the capture PC internal drive; then use it at 3.0 for the post capture work.

You should not muse storage drives for processing, and you should not use active drives for storage. PC internal hard drives are many times faster than USB and were designed to withstand the wear and tear of real-time processing. USB drives are slower and are not as durable under the stress of video processing. Use your USB storage drives for processing at your own risk. When they fail, you lose your processing and your captures.

He didn't say anything about the USB drive having the only copies of his files, only about using it for processing. Obviously making regular backups holds whether the drive in internal or external.

As for USB drives not being as designed for wear and tear as internal drives, sorry, but I don't agree with that at all. That may have been true long ago, but no longer. Most of the time they are the same internal drives but in an external enclosure. Heck, even the transfer speeds are enough to work with 4K footage, so editing SD videos is not a problem.

Erich

Just so long as the HDD inside the external drive is at least 7200 RPM. 5400 RPM can be painfully slow when transferring large files.

I doubt you"ll convince me that a 5.25" air-cooled hard drive like this https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...82E16822510044 and a 3.5" portable USB drive like this https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...82E16822178781 are "the same" as internal desktop drives. In my case the external drives I use for processing are 5.25" WD drives in fan-cooled, a.c.-powered enclosures. The external drives I use for storage are 3.5" portable USB drives.

If you intend to transfer captures from an XP machine to an external drive, you're limited to 2TB drives.

USB3 is just too slow for processing. It will be the bottleneck. I'm extremely fond of Seagate 5tb USB3 drives, but only for storage.

FYI, I did try to use USB3 for restoration, as a test. Painfully slow!

And actually, I don't even like HDD period for processing. I use SSDs.

lordsmurf,
Thought I saw posts of yours not so long ago espousing use of eSata drives for post capture work (I may have misread)?

I have internal Seagate 4tb for intermediary storage steps, but all processing is (usually) on Samsung 850 EVO SSD. Unless the filter chain is heavy, bottleneck in CPU/GPU, the SSD makes a slight speed difference.

lordsmurf, Point taken. But surely for this humble, goal-limited (modest processing), video converting baby-boomer, I don't really need to go the SSD route, do I?

What works, even at a slower rate, between internal and external conventional HD?

You alluded to CPU/GPU bottleneck. Am sticking with my (vintage 2011) Core i7 860. Would increase of RAM from current 8 GB to the max 16 help? But I'm interested in the GPU issue which I'll put on a separate post.

whoa.. comparing USB 3.0 to eSATA ? (shakes head..)

USB is a thing on a thing on a thing, its a PCI bus to a Host controller to a Hub controller to a Host adapter to a USB port.. and then its attached to USB port to a USB controller to an IDE or SATA bridge (and then) to a drive cache - (aaaannnd back again..)

That's a long long chain and depending on the condition of the cable it may be throttled, and depending on the condition of the power throttled, and depending on the temperature of the drive, throttled.. oh my... gosh.

eSATA is SATA to PCI bus and done and back again.

Not to mention the RF shielding and stable power supply most USB ports do not provide.

wow.. what a conversation

not to mention windows will not engage write cache because its identified as a non-hotplug device and only mounts it as a removable device and doesn't buffer it the same way.. slow is an understatement... at least for editing purposes.

pencil and paper might be faster

I know we get technophobia now and then opening a computer case.. or looking at a SATA mobile bay.. but ..

(shock and dismay over..)

Ok .. at least consider a Corsair GTX flash drive with a few hundred GB.. those have a full drive controller at the end of that long long USB chain of devices.. and windows will give it the benefit of a doubt and run a bit faster.. its like having an SSD on a stick.. and its solid aluminum to dissipate lots and lots of heat and it needs that for USB.

From USB drive to flash drive? Going from bad to worse, are we?

Whatever. You guys flash this out together. If the experience of others over the years is pooh-poooh in your estimation, now is a priceless opportunity to find out for yourselves

It's no secret that the HDDs (both 3.5" and 2.5") in external cases are from the internal drive line. There's no special run of drives for use in external cases. Up until sometime last year, the hottest deal was WD MyBooks that had either Red Label or rebadged Red Label drives NAS drives that went for twice as much as an internal. The rebadged drives (with a white label) were probably meant to be sold as OEM.

Several years ago, I got a bargain ($70 each) on decased 4TB, 2.5" laptop drives. They're all ST4000LM024, which are currently selling for $118 at Newegg

It's been reported that Fantom used/is using Hitachi drives in their externals, which are high quality cases with high quality interfaces, as well as proper cooling as mentioned. The premium is for case, which as I've said is high quality.

I've posted numerous times here and at videohelp.com about the evils of externals from the HDD manufacturers because of cheap USB interface in their case.

I've bought dozens of external drives over the past decade or so and have decased all of them. While some may be white label OEM drives, the model number is always the same as internals.

Circa 2015, Seagate brought out their 8TB Archive drives and was selling them in as externals cheaper (as it is with externals today) than as internals. Cloud provider Backblaze bought a bunch of them as externals because they were far cheaper than the exact same drives as internals and documented how they decased them and put them into play. I haven't kept up with their blog, but last I read about it, they didn't last long because of the heat and vibration of their pod storage environment.

Install removable drive cages (hotswap if you want) in both your PCs and use internal drives. Much faster and reliable than USB.

If you want to SSDs, you can get cages that can convert a single 5 1/4" drive bay into a 2 or 4, 2.5" bays. Also, if you want to install more 3.5" drives into your PC, there are adapters that can convert two 5 1/4" bays into three 3.5" bays and 3 5 1/4" bays into four 3.5" bays. Of course your need the SATA ports and drive connectors for each drive.

If you go the external route, I highly recommend the Mediasonic Probox series of external drive boxes. There are RAID and non-Raid versions that support USB 3.0 or eSata. The best buy is this: https://www.amazon.com/Mediasonic-Pr...gateway&sr=8-6 . 4 bay non-RAID.

I've been using them for years (both 4 bay and 8 bay) and while I don't run them 24/7 anymore (I used to), they've proven very reliable. *knock wood*, the only issue I've had is replacing the internal fan on one (it uses an odd size slim fan).

The only con is that it's not hotswap. If you remove or add a drive, all the other drives will stop and won't be recognized until the removed/added drive is recognized.

Also, your eSata port must be JBOD enabled or else the drives won't show up individually.

All very iinteresting suggestions. People are forgetting something: the first step is to transfer an AVI lossless capture from an XP machine. If XP can't read the external drive, the drive is useless for transferring.

Windows 7 is known to have i/o errors with USB 3.0 devices. The free TeraCopy add-in is the usual fix. https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/...nal-Hard-Drive, and other sources thru Google.

Anyone who uses the same drive for storage and for processing is asking for trouble.

Excellent point.

To transfer from my XP capture systems to my Win7 processing system, I use Fantom 2tb eSATA drives. But understand I also have some Win7 capture systems with USB cards, so for those it's again the Seagate 5tb USB3 drives.

5tb USB3:
https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Porta...language=en_US

2tb eSATA:
https://www.amazon.com/Fantom-Drives...language=en_US

Thanks to all of you. The discussion, mostly between yourselves with me listening, was very beneficial to me. Final questions:

If using my Win7 PC HDD (internal SATA: 7200 rpm system drive + 5400 rpm w/AVI file) is that workable, albeit at reduced speed, for processing? Or, with that setup for processing, make a third or external drive the target?

Something to understand is this conversation is all relative. I was doing digital video editing a few years before I did digital capturing. In those days, all we had were 4200rpm IDE hard drives and USB1. It worked. Slow, but worked.

Fast forward some years, and I was on "large" 200gb IDE.
Some years later, both SATA-1 50-750gb and whatever IDE hadn't yet failed.
Then all SATA-1, then SATA-2, then SATA-3.
Then no HDD at all, pure SSD for editing.

But it all worked. Just at different speeds. I still remember when a low-quality adaptive deinterlace took all day to crunch. Literally 24 hours for a 2-hour video. Now I can run a QTGMC in 30 minutes or less. Same goes for MPEG encoding, etc.

Win7 SATA is perfectly workable. The variable is just time and space. These days, space is almost infinite. I can clean off 5tb of data in a couple hours, and the system is near-virgin again to churn through more restoration.

(Unfortunately computer time doesn't equate to "me time". I'm markedly slower these days. But me being slow + a task being slow would be unbearable!)

I would (never) recommend any USB for capture, processing or storage.. ad infinitum (never).

But if you have to use USB, at least constrain the losses to something less than a 1 TB on a USB keyfob.. and make sure it keeps you from using a Hub, and keeps you from running it without any cooling solution.

I wouldn't call it a singing endorsement of the praises of USB attached drives.

USB is for mice, that's about it.. if your not a gamer.. and very patient.. a keyboard.. with a long internal buffer.

I do recommend USB for reading IDE drives (not writing !!!) to avoid messing around with Master/Save jumpers.

7200 rpm internal is sort of (okay.. I guess) since that's the (barely acceptable, standard) in desktops these days.. but for editing 15K drives might make more sense.. if the need for speed is there.. multiple striped.

The point that (these are 2019 problems, not 2001 problems) is valid and correct, context is everything.

You can get away with a lot of low end, cheap gear today to work with 480i video.

But for reference or storage drives 7200 SATA-3 would make sense.

eSATA is a passing technology.. it was King of the Hill in 2004 and died an early death in 2010.. your lucky to find it on a Thunderbolt dock these days since most chip manufacturers like Oxford no longer make them. OWC no longer carries practically anything with eSATA.

eSATA was very popular on laptops around 2008-2010.. but no more.

External drive enclosures and RAID bays just can't add eSATA anymore to save their life.. everyone wants 10Gig Ethernet or Thunderbolt.. eSATA is too simple a technology.. it did one thing very well.. now everyone wants multiple 4K displays, 10 Gig and USB 3.0 plus Fast charging through a single tiny USB-C connection.. and make it snappy.

USB is an interface and isn't inherently bad. IMO, what is inherently bad (as I've stated above) is the cheap USB interfaces on HDD manufacturer externals which sell for less than their internal versions.

Of the dozens of HDDs I have in use, only two are externals in cases. One is a 2.5" 4TB that I bought decased and put back in it's original case and the other is a 1TB Transcend portable that's been replaced three times, twice because of mechanical failure and once because of USB failure. The only reason I still keep and use it is because it has a three year warranty that expires next year.

For me, I have the best of both worlds with my Probox(s). They are permanently connected to my PCs (reducing wear and tear, and shock on the USB interface) and I can easily use my decased (formerly extneral) drives in them.

While it would be nice to have the additional speed of Thunderbolt, I can (and have multiple times) transferr 6-8TB of data between my boxes in ~24 hours with verification (Teracopy). To upgrade to Thunderbolt would cost multiple times the ~$100 I paid for my 4 bay boxes.

As for flashdrives, they're the modern equivalent to floppy discs. Slow and prone to failure without notice. They're fine for transferring/transporting files, but aren't in meant for long term storage.

Edit: I agree that eSATA's time has come and gone. My boxes have both eSATA and USB 3.0, but not all my PCs do, so USB 3.0 is far more universal.