Mat Maessen wrote:

> You'll get pretty close to "full" throughput with just one drive
> active on the hub. Something to remember about USB though, is that
> there is a lot of overhead in the data transfer, and you're never
> going to get the rated transfer speed over the bus (55mbits/second for
> USB2.0) for large-scale transfers. If the DVD recorder isn't fast
> enough to saturate the bus, you're golden.

Thanks, Mat - I should be OK since I will probably use the only one HD 
at a time.

That overhead with large transfers seems to be very true. I've been 
dumping about 50 - 70 gigs at a time onto the HD of my secondary PC, and 
then pushing all that onto the USB drive. It takes a few hours (2 - 3) 
for the upload from the PC to the drive. (Takes a lot longer to feed the 
DVD's into the pc.)

I initially tried to dump DVD's onto two PC's Iand then consolidate 
everything onto one via a 1 gigabit network connection, and upload it 
all onto the USB drives. (the only advantage to that is that I don't 
have to swap the USB cable from one PC to the other.)

I thought the 1 gbit Ethernet that connects the two PC's was supposed to 
be a lot faster than the USB drives -and for small transfers the mapped 
network drive seems to be fine. But the ethernet connection _really_ 
slowed to a crawl when I tried to pull about 60 gigs from one machine to 
the other - it took hours and hours. So it's better ot just copy to the 
PC's and swap the drive cable around.
> 
> If you REALLY want good throughput, get a 4-port USB add-on card, and
> plug each drive into its own port. 

Hmmmm - well, now that I think about it I could just put the existing 
USB devices onto the external hub and hook up the drives directly to the 
USP ports on the PC... The exiting stuff - printers, card readers, 
portable storage device - are used pretty infrequently...

Duh - I should of thought of that sooner...

thanks -

MCC


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Mark Cassino Photography
Kalamazoo, Michigan
www.markcassino.com
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