Show assets on thumb drive? Performance?
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I'd like to store all the videos for my shows on a 512GB thumb drive. If I run off that with USB3.1 is that going to be a performance issue, or will the videos be loaded and cached when the Isadora file is opened?
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They will stream from your drive. This will likely be a bandwidth bottleneck. You could run a drive speed test on the drive to see what it will support. It may work ok for 1 or 2 HD videos, but in general this isn't recommended.
You could however use a thunderbolt eternal M2 drive, which should give you rather fast speeds. I'm getting 930 MS/s with this type of drive, which is fast enough to run many of my shows from.
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to echo what @Dusx says, a fast external drive like Crucial X10 running over USB3.2 will be OK, but if your videos are long and you need sustained speeds then Thunderbolt is the better option. -
Actualy, this isn't really that simple to answer, as there are many factors, which would influence the possibilities.
USB 3.1 Gen1 does 5Gb/s data throughput theoretically. But in reality it is a bit less, because of the overhead. Anyway, this should be enough in almost all cases for a small to mid complex show. But still, there are more things to consider. Most USB drive doesn't offer the possible speeds which could be possible with the USB mode they propagate to support. Often it is much less then that. Even if they offer faster speeds for USB 3.2 (10Gb/s), they might be much slower in USB 3.1 mode. You need to look for tests, to see the real speeds of the devices. Then, some drives get hot quick on heavy load and then throttle their speed after a short while. Again something which could be taught by a test.
But I mean, in general with most USB drives you can copy your content much faster, then playing it back in real time, right? There shouldn't be no big difference between those data transitions. But copying/ streaming multiple files in parallel,depending on the controller quality of the drive, the actual speed could be much less, as the management of multiple parallel data streams reduces the actual throughput alot and sometimes more then 50%.
Last but not least, the codec and therefor the resulting bitrate of the videos define, what drive speeds you'd need.
You can kind of calculate what minimum of data speed on read mode you'd need, by multiplying the videos bitrate with the number of videos you going to play in parallel. It might be good to add at least 50% overhead.A ProRes 422 would go with around 150 Mbit/s on FullHD. On real world USB 3.1 Gen 1 speeds this would mean you theoretically could play 30 streams of it in parallel.
A ProPres 4K 4444 does around 750Mbit/s, which would still be up to 6 streams, just looking at the possible USB 3.1 speeds.
The fastest USB 3.1 drive I could find on a quick look, does 400 MB/s (3200 Mbit/s) sequential read (which means 1 long continuous reading like in video streaming instead of a lot of little file chunks which adds overhead). Which would still be enough for 3 to 4 HQ 4K streams.
But one more thing is a nono for me: USB often isn't very reliable connection wise. There always is the risk of an unconnect in mid show. I would not risk it, if not really needed.
