Thread: USB hard disk

A nutty question.I wonder if anyone tried running their seedbox with a decent USB hard disk rather than a conventional hard disk? What are your experience with it in terms of speeds and others?

I havent tried it, but it should be fine on a 100mbit line i think. On a Gigabit box the usb device would be limited by its bus speeds if using usb 1 or 2. On usb 3 it might be fast enough on the bus but I dont think the hard drive will be able to handle all the reads & writes.

so to sum it up: I would not suggest using external hard disk on any box faster than 100mbit ;-)

Interesting.100mbps line it is....

Works just fine. You probably would'nt notice much of a difference.

Originally Posted by bluboy

Works just fine. You probably would'nt notice much of a difference.

I agree with bluboy. Even I don't use USB HDD directly, rather than use it for my secondary storage, which I hold all my huge torrent on it, the speed isn't noticeable slow on the 100 mbps, since the USB speed still can handle the network speed easily. At my seedbox, the USB HDD using USB 2.0 port, so all is well. :)

But of course there's difference if you using it for copy or moving things around. Surely fixed HDD will beat them. It will difference at that case, but, mostly I use torrent especially Bluray, and I have no problem using it on my seedbox.

I just completed a month of seeding from and downloading to a 3TB external HD on USB 2.0 with a 25 mbps down / 3.5 mbps up and there was no degradation in performance compared to running straight off a SATA port. The only time performance was an issues was on re-checks.

As memumet indicated, copying is painfully sloooooow. I am getting only 44 MB/s right now copying the USB drive through a USB 3.0 port to my new media server. All friggin' day long. Painful. From what I've read on-line, that's good throughput for reading off a USB 3.0 drive. I should have just ripped it out of the case and dropped it on a SATA port. Lesson learned.

I guess a USB drive is not really meant to be used as a seedbox.Guess everyone should stick to SATA then.

No, a seedbox will work fine with a USB drive because the USB inteface will keep up with the network. It's when you have copying activity that you notice how slow it really is.