This is a nice new device which should be fast with ilink.  But this one little spec. scares me.  Anyone got any experience with this?

From SonyStyle:

• Data transfer rate:
Max. 20 M bytes/sec. when reading*
Max. 20 M bytes/sec. when writing*
* Varies according to the work load at the computer connected to the drive.

Is this even fast enough to watch a movie?
Where does the 400mbs come in?

I wrote a little review on this thing in the Gear forum a while back. In my experience, it’s plenty fast, faster than the TR’s internal drive even.

The 400 megabits/sec of FireWire/iLink is equal to 50 megabytes/second, but no 2.5” notebook drives can transfer at even close to that speed. Don’t worry about the 20MB/sec spec, it’s on par with a lot of portable drives. It’s definitely fast enough to watch movies, I have some ripped DVDs stored on it, and they play just fine.

This is always an easy thing to get confussed on. A lot of time when mbps is stated it can be confussed between Mega Bytes Per Second and Mega Bits Per Second.

Just incase your not aware there is 8 Mega Bits to a Mega Byte. So 400 Mbps which is the bus speed is 50 Mega Bytes Per Second.

20 Mega Bytes Per Second will be the speed that the Hard Disk can run, so it won’t fully saturate the bus but for an external Hard Disk it’s still a good transfer rate, more than enough to play movie files from.

Hope this helps.

And regarding enough speed. Yes, it’s more than enough speed. Even the highest quality video files (QT/Real/WMV9/DivX) won’t push 20MB/s…most will only push 2-5MB/s. Even straight DV captures won’t push 20MB/s.

i love this place. 

thanks.

I started my post, got distracted and had to leave it half way through and then posted when I got back. Looks like cellery beat me to it. Hehe.

Next time Cellery, next time

LOL, I was just doing a message board run during a break at work, and someone had a similar mbps/MBps question on another forum, so I copy/pasted my response from there.