Domestic Hi Def from a 1Tb WD 5400 Green Drive

[rtrt]

Looking to future proof some purchases as much as possible.

By domestic I mean using these drives at some point in the future to store Hi Def movies for streaming to a Hi Def screen at home. Can i assume that the sustained transfer rate of these 'slower' drives is still sufficient to stream hd?

If yes does anyone have a view as to any advantages of the 'faster' 7200 drives like the samsung spinpoint 1Tb for example - in the same environment. appreciate that this is a highly regarded drive for other applications - as discussed in some other posts.

appreciate that i might be better on another forum - just that i'm spending some time learning here :o and as the discs will be in my MP for a while it seemed ok to ask here and see what advice i get

[tersono]

Should be fine - the bottleneck is going to be network speed, not disk performance.

[rtrt]

Should be fine - the bottleneck is going to be network speed, not disk performance.

if i was running over 802.11n for example - see what you mean.

what about if they were in some sort of htpc type device - that was directly attached to the screen - any kind of performance issues there?

i suppose if i was trying to stream hi def whilst also trying to record something from air at the same time for example - then i might run into a botteneck earlier with the slower drive? or are drives so much faster than the other elements that i'd never normally hit that particular barrier?

[killmoms]

Well, the HD you'll be reading from the drive is heavily compressed, as it's likely in a distribution format like H.264. So you're only moving 6 - 15mbit/s streams, well below the bitrate of even regular SD video from a DV camcorder (25mbit/s). It's a CPU bottleneck (in decoding) and/or network bottlenecks (in streaming, since for anything above about 3 - 4mbit/s you'd basically need 802.11n or wired Ethernet to guarantee stutter-free playback).

As a point of interest, UN-compressed HD (of the sort used in broadcast/post-production facilities) can't be read off even 15,000 RPM drives—there's just too much data. :cool:

[rtrt]

Well, the HD you'll be reading from the drive is heavily compressed, as it's likely in a distribution format like H.264. So you're only moving 6 - 15mbit/s streams, well below the bitrate of even regular SD video from a DV camcorder (25mbit/s). It's a CPU bottleneck (in decoding) and/or network bottlenecks (in streaming, since for anything above about 3 - 4mbit/s you'd basically need 802.11n or wired Ethernet to guarantee stutter-free playback).

As a point of interest, UN-compressed HD (of the sort used in broadcast/post-production facilities) can't be read off even 15,000 RPM drives—there's just too much data. :cool:


thats the domestic stuff i couldn't find with google earlier, lot's of the broadcast kind of figures tho'.

think the wd drives are rated around 60mbits/sec so plenty of headroom as you say - appreciate the samsung is quite a bit higher - have seen 90mbit/s somewhere. or is that mbytes/s i'm never sure :confused:

thanks killmoms & tersono - the kind of rapid and useful response that makes sites like this worth coming back to even when you've got other stuff you should be doing :D