[jtap06]

Was wondering if it was possible to play .MKV files off of an external harddrive? Thinking of purchasing a 1TB or 2TB Western Digital Mybook. Will I experience any slow down compared to using an internal HD?

Should my specs be fine for playing all types of HD or should I think about upgrading? Also, what is better two 1TB drives or one 2TB drive? Thanks!!

Specs:

Intel Core 2 Quadcore Q6600 @ 2.4 GHz
3GB DDR2 SDRAM
ATI Radeon HD 3800

Windows Vista Home Premium

[watzen]

Was wondering if it was possible to play .MKV files off of an external harddrive? Thinking of purchasing a 1TB or 2TB Western Digital Mybook. Will I experience any slow down compared to using an internal HD?

Should my specs be fine for playing all types of HD or should I think about upgrading? Also, what is better two 1TB drives or one 2TB drive? Thanks!!

Specs:

Intel Core 2 Quadcore Q6600 @ 2.4 GHz
3GB DDR2 SDRAM
ATI Radeon HD 3800

Windows Vista Home Premium

I have all my movies on an external HD, a cheap iomega 1tb drive. Works perfect. So for playback it's not a problem to play high bitrate 1080p content. 40mbit vs 480mbit, that's not a problem for a external usb drive. They all exceed 3,75MB/s in real read speed.
Only thing is that when you download torrents at high speed the drive can't keep up. With high speed I mean in excess of 12MB/s.
A way around this is to keep the download folder on the internal systemdrive and then have uTorrent move the files to the external when they are finished.

[NatroN]

hi!

to play a movie (lets say 1080p with 2hours) your transfer rate as to be 2Mb/s or higher.

an internal drive will bring up to 70mb/s .. an external (cheap, low transfer rate) drive will do 20mb/s or more...

so there will never be a problem with mkv over external drive

[zag]

Works for me as well, I have 4 1tb drives setup for all my movies and tv shows. I set windows to power down the drives when not in use as well so it does take a few seconds for them to respond when I play a movie. Also don't save any coverart on the disks so they don't spin up unnecessarily.

[jtap06]

Also don't save any coverart on the disks so they don't spin up unnecessarily.

How would I go about doing this? I was planning on putting the fanart and TBN's in the corresponding movie folders on the external HD. I was under the impression that XBMC would automatically cache these to the internal harddrive where XBMC is at?

Thanks!

Also thanks to the other posters who have answered my initial question!

[mitul103]

I was under the impression that XBMC would automatically cache these to the internal harddrive where XBMC is at?

It does do this. The thumbs on the hdd with the media are only read during the initial scan of the media.

[Hitcher]

How would I go about doing this? I was planning on putting the fanart and TBN's in the corresponding movie folders on the external HD. I was under the impression that XBMC would automatically cache these to the internal harddrive where XBMC is at?

It will, only skins that use extra images (like Aeon) will need to access the HDD but, of course, you don't have to use these features.

[Jayquility]

Was wondering if it was possible to play .MKV files off of an external harddrive? Thinking of purchasing a 1TB or 2TB Western Digital Mybook. Will I experience any slow down compared to using an internal HD?

Should my specs be fine for playing all types of HD or should I think about upgrading? Also, what is better two 1TB drives or one 2TB drive? Thanks!!

Specs:

Intel Core 2 Quadcore Q6600 @ 2.4 GHz
3GB DDR2 SDRAM
ATI Radeon HD 3800

Windows Vista Home Premium

Wanted to specifically reply to your post that I currently watch my mkvs off of the very external drive(s) you are considering purchasing. It works very well with specs a great deal lower than yours (XP, Intel Pentium 4 2.6 GHz, 1.5 GB RAM). As far as whether or not to use one drive or two, just depends on how much you are willing to spend and the possibility of drive failure. 2 drives means you'll probably use each one individually less, but they'll be more expensive than buying just the single drive.