USB 2.0 a bottleneck for an external SSD?

[opio]

My family just got a new Asus RT-AC1750 router that does 802.11 ac/n/g/b, dual 2.4Ghz/5Ghz and has gigabit ethernet ports, which is a huge upgrade from the linksys e1000 we had.

Anyway, the router has 2 usb 2.0 ports on it that you can plug an external hard drive that everybody on the local network can use, you can even plug in flash drives and everyone can use that, I'm considering getting an external hard drive to mainly put all our movies, series and anime on it and stuff and wondering if an external SSD would be bottlenecked by usb 2.0 and if a HDD would be better price wise and stuff. Anybody know?

 

[k1114]

Definitely bottlenecks even a hdd. It can only do 30MB/s plus you don't need speed for playing movies. A hdd is going to be a lot cheaper for more space.

 

[Mark RM]

USB 2.0 is fast enough to watch a movie from, but it's raw throughput is a bottleneck to any hard disk.

Disk drive 100-150+MB/s , USB 2.0 actual 30MB/sec - again, you can watch a movie from that no problem.

 

[photonboy]

1) BLURAY is approx 7MBps

2) Most HD content is about 2MBps

3) HDD makes the most sense... however I suggest THIS instead:
https://www.amazon.com/Cloud-Personal-Network-Attached-Storage/dp/B00EVVGAC6/ref=sr_1_4?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1467607105&sr=1-4&keywords=wd+my+cloud

Ignore the reviews, Amazon is completely screwed up and mixing different models, plus most of the bad comments came when the first model launched but they fixed the issues since then. I've bought many of these.

This just plugs into the router via an ethernet adapter (if you run out of connections simply use a Gigabit Switch).

*Any computer connected to the router can get up to 90MBps reads/writes to this device. Wi-Fi would be bottlenecked by the wireless connection speed but that only matters for copying, not watching.

More..
I have the WD MY CLOUD to store lots of video and movies. However watching them depends on what media player you have connected (or part of) your HDTV. Not all media devices support all content.

A desktop PC is fine with a player like K-Lite Standard. Other devices that use Kodi Linux are usually fine, however things like BluRay players with media support or ROKU can be limited.

*You also can't show certain content through recent BluRay players due to Cinavia audio watermarks (even when you compress it). I ripped a Spider-Man movie, then tried to stream it through my Samsung BD player (yes I had the BluRay disc anyway) but it wouldn't play audio after several minutes (pop-up talks about Cinavia).

Ripping:
I use:
1) MakeMKV, then
2) Handbrake

If ROKU doesn't have Cinavia protection (or whatever you use) then you'll need to experiment with what video codec, audio codec and container profile works. THIS probably works:

Handbrake->
- Normal (on right)
- container (MP4)
- anamorphic-> none
- H.264
- variable
- 2-pass
- 8000Kbps
- optimize: normal (do very fast to test compatibility)
- AAC, 192Kbps, Dolby Pro Logic II
- chapters

Final note:
You can use the WD MY CLOUD as an external drive, just access it through File Explorer-> Computer-> "Network" (don't try to access it under the Media section if that shows which it may if you set it to act as a media server...

So yes, it can act as a media server thus decoding the video then streaming the video (so the media player doesn't decode the video just sends it to the HDTV). i have not tested this because it's not easy to setup with my BluRay player

 

[InvalidError]

Even 2.5" HDDs can do 60-100MB/s these days in largely sequential tasks like reading or writing media. If you download torrents directly to the HDD, make sure you pre-allocate the files to minimize fragmentation.

Even a 2.5" WD Black which can do over 100MB/s will grind to a halt on heavily fragmented files. I got quite a reminder of that when I consolidated media I had scattered across multiple HDDs over the past many years on a single larger USB3 external HDD: lightly fragmented files were copying at 90-110MB/s while heavily fragmented files struggled to remain above 10MB/s.