Will external hard drive be enough for h.264 playback?

Alright so what I REALLY need to do is build an HTPC, but I don't have the time or money for that right now. I use my Sager NP5793 hooked up to my HDTV to watch videos (much of it is HD content, some in h.264 or other formats) and play games. I just do not have enough space between all the computers in the house (none have very large capacity drives). I was about to buy an external hard drive (1TB) today as a temporary fix (and when I do build my HTPC I can use it with that still) BUT a thought occurred to me. I don't have any E-sata ports on my laptop, the best I've got is USB 2.0 or a mini IEEE 1394...you think that'll cut it? I mean to say, if I'm playing some video, while backing up a bunch of random files and whatnot, you don't think I'd have bandwidth issues do you?

 

It will cut it.

USB 2.0 transfer speeds are WAY more than enough for HD video.

/thread.

 

Yeah H264 is well compressed, does not take much space for a good quality video.

 

Thanks for the reply! Ok that's what I thought....but part 2 is where my real doubts lay. If I'm watching something that's 1080p while backing up a few gigs of pictures/music whatever, do you think there could be a huge bottleneck? Enough to either slow the transfer to a crawl or make the video stutter. I'm not up to speed on real world speed over USB, I've heard the "theoretical" numbers but we all know that's not what you'd actually see...

 

If you're doing other transfers at the same time, you will get poor playback; the problem isn't bandwidth, though - it's that the hard drive has to seek back and forth between two locations.

 

Yep. If you were copying a file from one SSD to another SSD over USB 2, you could transfer and play HD video perfectly over the same USB connection. It's the HDD that's the limitation.

 

i watch h264 1080p content from my usb 1.5tb external just fine the only thing you will experience is that when ever you skip or fast forward there will be a very small like 2-3 second delay

 

If you have the buffer set to a large enough amount, I believe you can avoid this issue. I have my buffer in smplayer set to 512 MB and it's fairly responsive in jumping 10 secs forward.