Whats the fastest possible way to transfer computer to compu

[fishquail]

Whats the fastest possible way to transfer large video files (60 Gigs and up) from one computer to the other computer?

I have tried doing it over the home network via Cat 5e and it takes up to 2 plus hours. I have tried transferring to a networked hard drive and that takes about an hour and half or more.

Is there any way to directly transfer these video files? The fastest method seems to be taking the hard drive out of one machine and hooking it up to the other. But this can get annoying to have to do every other day.

Note: this is for serious video editing on multiple machines. (HDV)

 

[Iceblue]

The fastest would be an external drive attached using eSATA.

Next fastest would be an external firewire 800 drive.

Next fastest would be an external firewire 400 drive.

Almost as fast as that is an external USB 2.0 drive.

All if these are fast enough for directly using the drive during video editing, so no actual copying of the file would be required. You can even do direct video capture to external drives using any of these technologies. USB 2.0 is the least expensive.

 

[folken]

If you are wanting to move files back and forth in a file sharing over the network sort of way look no furthur than Gigabit networking. For transfer of large files over a network that cannot be beat (at least for home setups, 10GB would be faster but it would cost an arm and a leg). The only bottleneck in that situation would be your hard drive speed
I attain on average 40MB/s to my file server with large files (videos, iso's, etc). At that speed 60GB would move in about 30min I believe. Again, it depends quite a bit on hard disk speed on both ends.
You could do a Gigabit Crossover if you only have two computers. I myself would still get a gigabit switch just in case of future computers or network devices.
Cat5e is fine if the computers are less than 100ft or so appart (or from switch). If the cable runs are longer than that go to Cat6 or Cat6 plus, they really arn't that much more expensive now.

If you have an extra arm and leg to sell and are serious about 10GB it would cost upwards of $10,000 for two computers. That would theoretically move just over 1GB/s, good luck finding a hard disk array that will do that though. Regular Gigabit can theoretically move up to 125MB/s, not many hard drives will even do near that.

 

[Iceblue]

At that speed 60GB would move in about 30min I believe.

But, an external drive will "move" in about 30 seconds!

Gigabit would make sense if he was trying to use the files in place (as in a NAS). He said he wanted to move them. Maybe he meant "access", I don't know. Or maybe multiple computers need to access the data on the one drive. But, if all he needs to do is move the file, an external drive is by far the fastest way to go.

 

[folken]

Working off of an external drive could be painful though. I've done a little video editing and even from that little experience I can say that working off of a disk array makes all the difference. I did my first project off of a single 250gb sata2 drive and it was painfully slow. The next time I went off of my 3 disk raid0 raptor boot array and it made all the difference. That is pretty close to opposite end of the spectrum but I still think at least doing a raid0 would make all the difference. I dont know of any external enclosures that will do raid0 and can move from computer to computer.

A single disk external drive would be fine for holding a completed video. That would still entail copy times to move from an internal working array to the external storage disk.

 

[Iceblue]

No arguments, although I suspect his computers are no faster than ATA 133 or SATA2 for their main drives.

Sometimes in the gigabit age we forget about how fast "sneakernet" really is. That's all I was saying.

 

[fishquail]

I think im going to go with Hot swappable drives -
and have dock in both computers.
ICY DOCK is a company that makes some SATA II hot swappable drives and it looks interesting. Hope this solves the problem.
Plus, external hard drives are a pain to unplug the power and connector cables all the time. To get under the desk and find the surge protector.

 

[sip]

I think im going to go with Hot swappable drives -
and have dock in both computers.
ICY DOCK is a company that makes some SATA II hot swappable drives and it looks interesting. Hope this solves the problem.
Plus, external hard drives are a pain to unplug the power and connector cables all the time. To get under the desk and find the surge protector.

put you usb/firewire/resata connector and a single plug socket on the desktop then

it wil be beter no matter which way you look at it