Fastest way to load movies from hard drive

[jzbestalive]

So I have a lot of HD video and other media stored on an external hard drive (Western Digital 2TB elements and WD MyPassport 1TB).
Sometimes when I load HD video to my computer (via USB, I think USB 2.0) sometimes it lags and loads slowly (even with optimized video player preferences).
I also load video directly to the television (Samsung LED TV that has smart software or whatever with apps and can read hard drives).

I want to know what is the fastest way to load media from this drive to my television and my computer. Do I need to change the connection/interface, do I need a better drive (eg with flash storage or different interface like USB 3.0 or thunderbolt), are the settings or small things I can do to improve the loading speed? Or...

Alternatively, I am interested in any advice for what is the best way to transfer all of my media that is on this hard drive to a new drive/device (ie a new HTPC), and what new drive/device I should buy/build to most optimally play my video on the television.

Thanks for any advice

 

[TheWarrior]

Eek! Is Firewire 800 and option on this drive? If so, buy the cord and save the money on a drive!

 

[jinjuku]

In all reasonableness USB 2.0 should be more than adequate for playing back movies. You shouldn't have any stutter. If you have a bunch of USB devices connected I would remove those and try again.

 

[BMXTRIX]

What are you using to play back on your computer? What are the file sizes? Most TVs stream content, they don't load it, so it must be directly connected, or networked. If your network is bogged down or to slow, then you won't get a good stream to your TV.

I have a WD World Book, and it is terrible. I have a far more expensive NAS setup (Thecus N4100Pro) and put it on a Gigabit network, and I can take native Blu-ray feeds, two of them right now, and play them back with no problems at all in my home.

Something is clogging things up, and the drive setup itself may be an issue.

 

[Grador]

I can attest to USB 2 being enough bandwidth for a native bluray rip to play back perfectly. The problem is somewhere else.

 

[GlocksRock]

I use media player classic 64 bit and it works great, it plays stuff that used to stutter real bad when played back with anything else.

 

[g0bez]

As others have said, USB2 is definitely fast enough.

You didn't mention, but do you get lag in your playback on both the computer AND on the TV? Or does the TV play it back smoothly?

If the TV does play back smoothly, the issue is with your computer.

If both your TV and computer play back with the lag/chop, it sounds to me like your disk IO is the bottlenck. For instance, if your disk is getting full or if other processes are accessing the disk at the same time, it could be preventing the head from accessing the data as quickly as you need. If you have a disk that you can play smoothly from, I'd run some disk speed tests on it and and compare those results with those from the drive(s) you're having issues with.

Depending on the actual drive inside the enclosure, you could also be running into some sort of timeout issue. I know some WD disks have some "intelligent" aspects which make them more energy efficient. While this can be good for saving power, it can cause issues in performance-intensive situations.


It sounds like you're on windows, in which case I don't know how to test disk IO performance or identify programs that are waiting for disk access, but if you're on linux by some chance (or a Mac) I can help you out there. Let me know if that would be useful and I can send some tests you can run.