Help me store & play media on the cheap.

May 24, 2009 10:24 AM

I bought my mac laptop just before digital media became the thing. That said, my internal hard drive just can't hold it all. There are a lot of variations on this question on the hive and other places, but I am having trouble finding an answer to a basic question. How fast does a external hard drive need to be to play music and video off of without hiccups or interruption? Want to spend <$100 if I can.
posted by shimmer to technology (16 comments total)

For playback (not capture) of compressed audio & video (i.e. no uncompressed HD, DVCPRO100, or ProRes, or any other capture/editing oriented formats), a normal USB 2.0 drive (spec'd at 480Mbps but in practical usage not actually that fast) should work without issue, and as long as your computer can provide enough power over the USB bus, a portable drive (i.e. one without its own power supply) should work just fine. Buy the biggest drive you can afford from a brand you trust.
posted by kid_dynamite at 10:28 AM on May 24

All harddrives are fast enough. It's the cpu which is the limitation for video. All are fast enough for music.
posted by flif at 10:29 AM on May 24

What kind of a mac laptop do you have? What kind of digital media do you mean? MP3s? Video? Standard definition? HD?
I bought my 1TB external USB 2.0 drive for €79, which is about a hundred bucks. What really counts, especially if you're dealing with any kind of digital video, is that you have USB 2.0.
posted by dunkadunc at 10:36 AM on May 24

I've had issues with using a simple passport drive as my primary external HD. The USB didn't always seem to give enough power and sometimes the HD didn't show up. Since I switched to a FreeAgent drive with it's separate power source, I've had absolutely no problems. I'd recommend also going with 7200 RPM.
posted by ruwan at 10:37 AM on May 24

I bought my mac laptop just before digital media became the thing.

when was this, 2001? 2002? current hds work just fine; if anything, the problem is your laptop.
posted by lia at 10:37 AM on May 24

'97, '98? Do you even have firewire? USB 2.0?
posted by mr_roboto at 10:44 AM on May 24

I'll concur with the rest of the crowd -- all currently available hard drives and hard drive interfaces (USB 2.0, firewire 400, SATA and eSATA) are adequate for playing music and conventional HD video. However, your laptop may be old enough that it doesn't support these newer, faster interface standards, or enough CPU power to play back modern video formats.

If you're talking about a G3-based Mac, it's probably time to upgrade the machine, not just the hard drive. A G4-based Mac should be able to play standard video or music without trouble, but may have trouble with HD video or playing videos while other processes are running even with a current hard drive. A G5 or Intel-based Mac should generally have no problem playing music or video with any current internal or external hard drive.
posted by eschatfische at 10:48 AM on May 24

NewEgg is running a special right now on a 1TB USB2 drive for $95. (I am offering information, not a recommendation.)
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:50 AM on May 24

USB 2.0 was added to the PowerBook line in September 2003. If you have a PowerBook and it predates that, you will not be able to use a USB hard drive at good enough speeds for A/V. If you have a FireWire port on a PowerBook or iBook, though, it will be perfectly fine. You just have to get a FireWire hard drive, which won't be as cheap as a USB one since they're not as mass-market these days.

If you have USB 2.0 and you get a drive that doesn't have a separate power supply, you may have to get a dual-headed USB cable to provide enough power (this is probably what ruwan was talking about). Basically you have to plug it into both USB ports to use the drive. You can buy these cables for a few bucks or if you complain to the manufacturer they will usually send you one for free.
posted by bcwinters at 11:47 AM on May 24

I recently bought a 500GB internal drive for my laptop, cost about $100 and is a mega-liberating leap from the 60 GB one that came with it. Not what you were asking, just saying that option might be cheaper than you think.
posted by samsm at 11:59 AM on May 24

Another consideration is memory. Macs manage it better than PCs, but you should still look at giving your computer as much as you can (of course, if your laptop is old enough, the memory may well be too expensive to be worth upgrading, because obsolete RAM formats get expensive quickly). Hiccups are often a caching issue; hard drives and the computer bus can be overwhelmed but more often this is something that happens closer to the user interface.
posted by dhartung at 1:00 PM on May 24

To run some numbers; the absolute maximum bandwidth required to play a bluray film (video + audio + subtitles) is 48Mb/s. With 720p matroska x264 films with AC3, I've found the max bandwidth to be about 12Mb/s, about the same as standard DVD in MPEG2.

USB 2.0 full speed and firewire 400 are both capable of doing about 400Mb/s, and they're generally slower than the drive. Straight audio and xvid? You'll have oodles to spare.

The bigger problem is going to be the CPU - playing back 720p or 1080p content is hard work on your CPU unless GPU accelerated. I've found a vast difference between playback codecs; vlc and mplayer are much more intensive than coreavc, for example, and struggled on an intel core 2 6600 with 1080p playback. I'm afraid I don't have a great suggestion for the best player on osx for minimum cpu load on an older laptop.

If it's just mp3's and xvids though, it won't be a problem.
posted by ArkhanJG at 1:03 PM on May 24

Sorry, I meant USB 2.0 high speed; full speed is much slower, only 12Mb/s.
posted by ArkhanJG at 1:04 PM on May 24

The 7200rpm external Firewire drive for my 2004-vintage iBook could capture digital video when the internal 5400rpm drive choked, so Firewire/USB 2.0 on a 7200rpm drive with external power should do you fine. But as others have said, the CPU/RAM combo is the bottleneck on pre-Intel Macs for HD playback.
posted by holgate at 1:14 PM on May 24

Thanks for the help so far. I am working with a iBook G4 with firewire. Its plenty fast for media, and i did put in a memory upgrade, but it only came with 30 gigs. I think a firewire connection would be great, since I only have two usb's and one is for the mouse.
posted by shimmer at 5:25 PM on May 24

The odds are your USB is 1.1, which is limited to 12 megabits per second. Firewire is almost certain the right answer for you.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 8:01 PM on May 24