About USB sticks and portable hard disks.

[Joker]

Hello,

Is it bad for your USB and portable hard disks if you play video or audio files directly off them?

 

[Thanee]

No.

The only bad thing about that is, that the transfer rate is lower from these devices as compared to a regular hard disk, but it's sufficient for videos.

Bye
Thanee

 

[JiffyPopTart]

There is a limited amount of times you can write to the memory of a USB stick...but since that amount is in the hundreds of thousands per byte you should have at it.

Occasionally you can zap a USB stick by removing it before turning it off in windows, so if you are using one as a media center without a backup you might want to be sure to do that step.

DS

 

[azhrei_fje]

There is a limited amount of times you can write to the memory of a USB stick...but since that amount is in the hundreds of thousands per byte you should have at it.

Really? Hundreds of thousands? If you have a link to a technical site that says that, I'd be very interested. Some of the new Samsung units have very high rewrite rates before failure, but those are very expensive units so far.

The read performance from either type of unit will be more than enough for audio. For video (assuming MPEG2 compression) you'll want at least 4-5 Mbps uncompressed so about 2-3 Mbps from the device should be plenty. Both types of devices are rated for speeds much, much higher than those so you shouldn't have any issue.

<tangent>
If you get tired of waiting when writing to an external drive, go with a Firewire drive (the technical name is IEEE-1394). I commonly get about 2-3 MB/s to my external 7200 RPM drive over Firewire-400 and about a third of that or a little less using USB 2.0 -- to the same drive in the same enclosure.

Note that USB 3.0 has been ratified as a standard; Linux has drivers for USB 3.0 already, but Windows doesn't (that I know of). Devices should begin showing up early this summer (chips were being sampled last May). It probably won't kill Firewire-800 because it's still interrupt-based instead of DMA, but it's a move in the right direction; it can theoretically provide speeds of up to 400 MB/s (yes, that's "MB"). USB 2's theoretical upper limit is 53MB/s but rarely will a device achieve more than 10-15 MB/s (about 25%) so USB 3 should be expected to see real world speeds of 100 MB/s as an upper limit (my personal opinion is that it'll be closer to 70-80 MB/s on Windows).
</tangent>

 

[JiffyPopTart]

Another limitation is that flash memory has a finite number of erase-write cycles. Most commercially available flash products are guaranteed to withstand around 100,000 write-erase-cycles, before the wear begins to deteriorate the integrity of the storage.[7] Micron Technology and Sun Microsystems announced an SLC flash memory chip rated for 1,000,000 write-erase-cycles on December 17, 2008.[8]

Cut-and-Pasted from the Wikipedia article on Flash Memory.

DS

 

[Blackbrrd]

<tangent>
If you get tired of waiting when writing to an external drive, go with a Firewire drive (the technical name is IEEE-1394). I commonly get about 2-3 MB/s to my external 7200 RPM drive over Firewire-400 and about a third of that or a little less using USB 2.0 -- to the same drive in the same enclosure.
</tangent>

It sounds like you are getting USB 1.0 speeds, about 1MB/s. Typically you should get about 20MB/s to and from USB 2.0.