Now - I've never tried this, but... It's true that USB 2.0 is slower than an IDE/SATA controller. USB 2.0 is limited to 480 Mbps = 60 MB/s, but in practice it will be much lower - I have a USB 2.0 enclosure whose transfers top out at just over 200 Mbps, 25 MB/s. IDE and SATA controllers are faster but are still only as fast as the hard drive - 80 MB/s peak in bursts for short intervals with the very fastest hard drives.
USB 2.0 has another strike against it - CPU usage. It's less efficient than Firewire and eSATA in terms of CPU usage. However in these days of dual-core CPUs it doesn't amount to much of a hit, but it's not 0. With all this though, your limiting factor will be the optical drive speed. Even if you could rip at 52X (and you won't), it's limited to 7.8 MB/s - you'll be nowhere near saturating even poor USB 2.0 interfaces. I suppose if you did something stupid like use the external drive to store the temporary WAVs and the final encoded FLAC, MP3 etc. compressed files it would be a problem as the data would be passed back and forth repeatedly, but still, an optical drive is slow, slow, slow. -- Mark Lanctot 'Sean Adams' Response-O-Matic checklist, patent pending!' (http://forums.slimdevices.com/showpost.php?p=200910&postcount=2) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mark Lanctot's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2071 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=35504 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
