HD bitrates & 1.8" HDD support

[nalooti]

Hi,

I was wondering if 1.8" hard disk drives have enough data bitrate (at 4200 rpm) to sustain playing a HD movie (e.g. an external HDD connected to a DVD/DivX player with USB port).

Obviously the answer is not simple and depends on many parameters but it should be possible to build a worst case scenario:
USB 1.1 bandwidth (12 Mbps), Max disk platters data bitrate (? hard to find specs), Mpeg2 HD bandwidth (15 Mbps ???).
For HD contents, there are obviously many factors; one is the algorithm Mpeg2/4 . Assuming Mpeg4 needs lower bitrate for the same quality, Mpeg2 is the worst case. But the other factor is resolution on which depends the final bitrate in ANY compression standard.

The questions are:
1/ Do you know any list comparing different compression standards based on the type of contents (SD, HD, resolutions, ...) and the codec standard (Mpeg2, Mpeg4 AVC, etc.) ?

2/ Did you ever use a 1.8" HDD for playing video files ? If yes what is the max resolution/bitrate that the HDD supported?

many thanks
nalooti

[toytown]

I was wondering if 1.8" hard disk drives have enough data bitrate (at 4200 rpm) to sustain playing a HD movie

It obviously depends on if the 1.8" is doing anything else at the time, but the last 1.8 i got to play with had transfer rates averaging 19MegaByte/152Megabit a second. This was last year and using a PATA interface, so i would have expected newer drives to be even faster. Obviously if the drive is being used for other things then performance will suffer, but this is no different to any other harddrive.

So to answer your question, i would say that yes a 1.8" HD can sustain enough data bandwidth to support even HDDVD/Bluray ripped movies at 1080p, in the majority of the cases.

If you dropped to a USB1 interface, then obviously the limiting factor is that and no longer the drive.

[Shinigami-Sama]

hit up HD tune or any other similar program and if its average transfer rate is over 15Mi/s you should be good
a 10 year old second rate drive from a win 2k5 box I had tested at well over that
so it should run well

if its just under that hit up the buffer length on your player and pray

[Mtz]

You cannot play High bitrates via USB port. The problem is in the usb port from your player. Also HD resolutions cannot be played in actual standalone divx players.

enjoy,
Mtz