Is a 5400 rpm hard drive enough to play h264?

[lolmao500]

Hi. I've searched the forum, and nobody asked this question.

I'm planning on buying an external hard drive and I'm asking myself if it will ``lag`` if I play h264 movies on it?

Basically, is there a difference in fluidity while playing a h264 movie, between a 5400 and a 7200 rpm hard drive?

Thanks.

[Inspector.Gadget]

No problems here.

[CWR03]

The rotational speed has nothing to do with the transfer rate of data it can give.

[Groucho2004]

The rotational speed has nothing to do with the transfer rate of data it can give.

Yeah, right. The laws of physics appear to be different in the part of the universe you are from.

If the rotational speed has nothing to do with the transfer rate, why would it have to rotate at all?

[CWR03]

What I meant was that the transfer rate is not determined by the rotational speed alone. When 7200 RPM drives first came out, the main improvement was seek time. Some were even rated at a slower sustained transfer rate before the technology improved.

[Flux]

Blu-ray movie can use up to 54 Mbit/s which probably is very very rare anyway. That is 6,75 MB/s which is ridiculous low for hard drives because modern hard drives can do close 100 MB/s (800 Mbit/s). Probably even hard drives from before year 2000 could do it easily. So 5400 rpm does practically nothing bad for video playback.

Only tons of small tiny files are poison for any rotating hard drive. Video files are one big chunk and therefore ideal for these rotating disks.

[osgZach]

Drive rotation aside, the limiting factor on any player conntecting to an external HDD, is gonna be the USB2 port anyway. God I wish they would kill it or finally push the next version through.

[CWR03]

Drive rotation aside, the limiting factor on any player conntecting to an external HDD, is gonna be the USB2 port anyway. God I wish they would kill it or finally push the next version through.
The last two PCs I put together have front-access eSATA ports. A lot of universal HDD enclosures can be configured for either USB or eSATA.

[osgZach]

True enough, but USB 2.0 only drives are still much less expensive for the capacity they provide. Almost $200 for 1TB either from a USB/eSATA model, or a $100 HDD plus the cost of the enclosure, is still kind of steep when a simple USB 2.0 external is only $100.

Luckily I can just jack my WD TV Live into our Gigabit network and use a PC as a media server. I just have to get the cable through the floor to the living room.. Thankfully we have radiator heat, so we have good spots to feed cable down next to the pipes without any extra drilling.

[DJ Bobo]

As Flux said, the highest possible bitrate is 54Mbit/s for blu-rays, this is nothing compared to the 240Mbit/s net bitrate possible with external USB 2.0 hard drives.

So don't worry! And you better get a 5400rpm drive (less noise!), 'cause even slower models are faster than the USB 2.0 interface, so they will be limited by it anyway!