Transfer rate through USB port

[T0my]

Hello,

As I have some problems reaching my files through LAN, I am thinking of buying a portable USB device.

For the same price, here are the 2 products  I am interested in:

1)
CORSAIR Flash Voyager GT - USB2 Disk 4GB
34MB/s Read 25MB/s Write
Plug & Play functionality in Windows? Vista, XP, 2000, ME, Linux 2.4 and later

2)
I-ROCKS IR-9100 - External HDD 1.8'' 20GB  4200rpm USB2
with the properties of the Toshiba HDD inside:

Which shows an average read of 14.9 MB/s

Will the render of movies be better with the Corsair than the I-Rocks as its read rate is 2x faster? Or won't it change anything?
Will I need to format the I-Rocks with FAT, or NTSF is also ok?

Thanx for your help! 

[greyback]

The USB port of the OSD is only USB 1.1, which has a speed of about 1mbps if my memory is correct. Nearly every device goes at USB 2 now, so the OSD is the bottleneck in that case.

I believe that USB 1.1 speeds are sufficient for playing any video file that'll look good on the OSD. It should be fast enough to record SuperFine quality video without dropping frames.

While the OSD with recent Dev firmwares can read & write to NTFS formatted drives, it's still much slower than with FAT drives. So I'd recommend whatever you choose that it's formatted with FAT.

External HDD are cheaper per Gigabyte usually, but less portable. Flash memory can be quite different when it comes to random read/write speeds, that's a statistic worth checking. But it's less of an issue if you'll only be transferring large videos.

Do find a review to see if the HDD casing smothers the noise of the disk drive inside well, some cheaper ones allow the nasty buzzing and ticking noises escape, which is distracting when watching video.
-G

[budwzr]

I use a Western Digital Passport 160G drive (about $110). It doesn't need a power supply. Works just like a flash drive. If you're going to leave it on all the time you might want to get a powered USB hub (about $30) so the OSD doesn't have to supply power constantly.