# External USB Storage transfer speed



## emathis (Mar 19, 2003)

Not too impressed with the transfer speed. My first transfer was 3 hours of HD, and the estimated time was 30 minutes. Is this about what everyone else is getting?


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## ChuckA (Feb 7, 2006)

But of course all archiving is done in the background. You can watch other things, do recordings or even turn the receiver off and let it archive over night if you want. So, speed does not seem very important.


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## emathis (Mar 19, 2003)

ChuckA said:


> But of course all archiving is done in the background. You can watch other things, do recordings or even turn the receiver off and let it archive over night if you want. So, speed does not seem very important.


That's good to know. I didn't know the transfer would continue with the receiver off.


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## ChuckA (Feb 7, 2006)

Cause its never really off unless you pull the plug.


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## ggulch (Jul 25, 2007)

emathis said:


> That's good to know. I didn't know the transfer would continue with the receiver off.


3 hours is probably around 10 gig, figuring that 3 hours is 10% of the 30 hours of HD that the 300 (or so) gig drive in the 622 will hold. Firewire would offer faster transfers and I wouldn't be surprised to see them go this route or possibly even NAS (network attached storage-a big drive or drives attached directly to a network rather than a single computer/server via Ethernet) at some point in the future.

Thinking about it, the NAS idea could allow access to the programs stored on it from any DVR and possibly any other control box plugged into the same network. This model is used all of the time in large editing facilities. Source media is stored centrally and can be accessed from a number of editing workstations.

Please understand that I do NOT work for Dish nor do I have any back channel knowledge. I do however deal with production, post and content delivery, and over the past year I've been seeing some trends that indicate that, for many end user situations, rather than progressing from tape to disk to cable/satt/download as most of us expected, there's a jump from tape to the cable/satt/download model. Maybe part of that is the HiDef disk format war that's going on, but regardless, I think it's a definite trend.

At home I have four desktops, three Macs and 1 PC, plus a Mac laptop. Because I wanted high speed data transfer between my Mac editing work station and the PC (used for compression), I used a gigabit switch (tied to a cable modem via a Netgear WiFi router). As of this afternoon, both of our 622 DVRs will be plugged into the switch, too. Hopefully the computers and the DVRs will be able to "talk" to one another sometime down the road.

FWIW,
Ron


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## Rob Glasser (Feb 22, 2005)

If you check out my First Look at the top of this forum I have posted some of my transfer results. http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.php?t=94818


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

So, practically the transfer speed it 3..5 Mb/s. Hmm, it's close to USB 1.1 then to USB 2.0

Now tell me about advantage using USB v2.0 with theoretical speed 480 Mbps .

D* made right choice using eSATA !


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## Rob Glasser (Feb 22, 2005)

P Smith said:


> So, practically the transfer speed it 3..5 Mb/s. Hmm, it's close to USB 1.1 then to USB 2.0
> 
> Now tell me about advantage using USB v2.0 with theoretical speed 480 Mbps .
> 
> D* made right choice using eSATA !


My guess is that they are throttling the speed so the other functions can continue. While the transfer is going you can still watch a different DVR event and have all your tuners recording.

Personally I'd rather give us transfer speed and let it just run in the background, vs having it run at full speed but not be able to do anything else or have limited functionality on the DVR during the transfer.


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## Hunter Green (May 8, 2006)

P Smith said:


> Now tell me about advantage using USB v2.0 with theoretical speed 480 Mbps .


I bet you're going to see, and need, that USB2 speed when things are going the opposite direction, when you're watching video on the external drive.


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## Stewart Vernon (Jan 7, 2005)

I don't have an external drive yet... but I concur that probably the reason for the "slowness" is so it can process in the background and still allow the normal use of the receiver. It might be nice, however, in the future to have a "turbo" option so that if you wanted to go full-on transferring you could go into a transfer-only mode and not be able to do anything else while data is sent. You could go off in another room and have a snack or something.


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## BarneyC (Jan 9, 2005)

Does anyone know if a SATA II drive would transfer any faster than an IDE?

B.


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## ChuckA (Feb 7, 2006)

BarneyC said:


> Does anyone know if a SATA II drive would transfer any faster than an IDE?
> 
> B.


Drives are like CPUs in that they all wait at the same speed.


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## TBoneit (Jul 27, 2006)

Seems to me it should ramp up the transfer speed when you hit the power button and turn off the 622, and yes I know it isn't realy off then.

When it is in screensaver the most that can be happening is recording two(Three if OTA) HD channels vs record 2or 3 and play two more.


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## Moridin (Mar 22, 2005)

Not true, I think. In dual mode TV2 could be playing back an event on the external HDD, eating up (potentially) up to 19.2Mbps of the USB bandwidth.


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## Rob Glasser (Feb 22, 2005)

Moridin said:


> Not true, I think. In dual mode TV2 could be playing back an event on the external HDD, eating up (potentially) up to 19.2Mbps of the USB bandwidth.


I need to double check this, but last I checked USB Storage is not available from TV2 when running in dual mode.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

BarneyC said:


> Does anyone know if a SATA II drive would transfer any faster than an IDE?
> 
> B.


Look above - we just discussing why transfer speed is too slow, much low then USB 2 (480 Mbps) interface and SATA ( 1.5/3 Gbps) disks. IDE disks support 1 or 1.33 Gbps. Max.


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