Portable storage questions

[Brandi93]

So I'm moving a lot currently from place to place. I carry around a generic low-brand laptop I got just to store and watch movies on the go. It has a 256GB SSD in it, it does the job for now but I wanted to build a movie library of full HD movies so I can have a lot of movies to pick from and not having to delete old ones, in case I wanted to re-watch them. Also if the battery life becomes so bad that I'm better off getting a new laptop in the future, I would have all my content saved on the external drive and just plug n play. 

 

When it comes to portable storage, can I play movie files directly from them?

Does it make a difference for portable storage to be HDD or SSD?

USB port 3.0 or 2.0 difference at all? for movie playback?

What drive size would I need to store hundreds, maybe a thousand movies?

[podkall]

8 minutes ago, Brandi93 said:

When it comes to portable storage, can I play movie files directly from them?

yes

 

8 minutes ago, Brandi93 said:

Does it make a difference for portable storage to be HDD or SSD?

probably not, except the data transfer rate, say you move all movies from PC to SSD in 5 minutes, and on HDD in 10-15 minutes,

 

but playback should be smooth, shold

 

8 minutes ago, Brandi93 said:

USB port 3.0 or 2.0 difference at all? for movie playback?

probably not, not an expert, 2.0 is 60MB/s more than enough for movie playback

 

4k movie is on average 6MB/s according to google

 

10 minutes ago, Brandi93 said:

What drive size would I need to store hundreds, maybe a thousand movies?

you can do the math by looking at the size of movies

[filpo]

14 minutes ago, Brandi93 said:

So I'm moving a lot currently from place to place. I carry around a generic low-brand laptop I got just to store and watch movies on the go. It has a 256GB SSD in it, it does the job for now but I wanted to build a movie library of full HD movies so I can have a lot of movies to pick from and not having to delete old ones, in case I wanted to re-watch them. Also if the battery life becomes so bad that I'm better off getting a new laptop in the future, I would have all my content saved on the external drive and just plug n play. 

 

When it comes to portable storage, can I play movie files directly from them?

Does it make a difference for portable storage to be HDD or SSD?

USB port 3.0 or 2.0 difference at all? for movie playback?

What drive size would I need to store hundreds, maybe a thousand movies?

usb 3 or 2 won't make too much of a difference unless its a high speed storage device (usb 3 spec max speed is 5gbps, usb 2 max is 480). 

14 minutes ago, Brandi93 said:

Does it make a difference for portable storage to be HDD or SSD?

yes, for one hdds are much heavier than ssds so much easier to carry than hdds, also ssds are more reliable and they aren't much more expensive nowadays

14 minutes ago, Brandi93 said:

What drive size would I need to store hundreds, maybe a thousand movies?

if they are all fhd and not 4k (considering a minute of 1080p30 is 130mb times 60 = 7800mb) then 7800 x 2 = 15600 for a feature length movie and then multiply that by 1000 to get 156000000mb of space from a thousand movies which in gb is 156000. you would need a pretty big drive for a thousand movies (156000 gb = 156 tb) so for a few hundred (say 300) it would be about 4.68tb of space. A good but expensive drive for all that is in the ss below  

[Brandi93]

 

8 minutes ago, podkall said:

yes

 

probably not, except the data transfer rate, say you move all movies from PC to SSD in 5 minutes, and on HDD in 10-15 minutes,

 

but playback should be smooth, shold

 

probably not, not an expert, 2.0 is 60MB/s more than enough for movie playback

 

4k movie is on average 6MB/s according to google

 

you can do the math by looking at the size of movies

Perfect! Thanks for the quick reply. 

 

5 minutes ago, filpo said:

usb 3 or 2 won't make too much of a difference unless its a high speed storage device (usb 3 spec max speed is 5gbps, usb 2 max is 480). 

yes, for one hdds are much heavier than ssds so much easier to carry than hdds, also ssds are more reliable and they aren't much more expensive nowadays

if they are all fhd and not 4k (considering a minute of 1080p30 is 130mb times 60 = 7800mb) then 7800 x 2 = 15600 for a feature length movie and then multiply that by 1000 to get 156000000mb of space from a thousand movies which in gb is 156000. you would need a pretty big drive for a thousand movies (156000 gb = 156 tb) so for a few hundred (say 300) it would be about 4.68tb of space. A good but expensive drive for all that is in the ss below  

I think it depends on the format as well. Most of the movies I have on my internal SSD don't actually go over 2GB total size for a 2-Hour movie. The format I use the most is .mkv and they are not actually 1920x1080 but more on the lines of 1920x800 (movie black bars). Also framerate is 24 not 30 for me. 

 

Given that an average full-length full HD movie for me is 2GB or 2048MB...

A 2TB Drive should hold a thousand or pretty close amount of movies by my calculations. 

[leclod]

While there exists (surprisingly) good encoded movies of 2-3GB, most aren't. And forget 3h movies (Dune, Tenet, John Wick...).

The average good size for HD(720) movies is 4.5GB, FullHD(1080) is 8.5GB.

A good encoded HD movie is good enough for me because FullHD won't do twice as good.

Most FullHD sized movies of 4.5GB are worse than the equivalent HD sized movie of 4.5GB.

I'd go higher than 5TB and definitely higher than 2TB. Consider also, the more TBs, the cheaper the TB.

Around here a bare 18TB Toshiba HDD only costs 260.-

 

And if you go 2TB, just go SSD, don't bother HDD

Edited March 25, 2023 by leclod

[filpo]

6 minutes ago, Brandi93 said:

 

Perfect! Thanks for the quick reply. 

 

I think it depends on the format as well. Most of the movies I have on my internal SSD don't actually go over 2GB total size for a 2-Hour movie. The format I use the most is .mkv and they are not actually 1920x1080 but more on the lines of 1920x800 (movie black bars). Also framerate is 24 not 30 for me. 

 

Given that an average full-length full HD movie for me is 2GB or 2048MB...

A 2TB Drive should hold a thousand or pretty close amount of movies by my calculations. 

so would be 2 x 300 = 600 gigs or at most 2 x 1000 for 2000 gigs for a thousand. Sorry thought you were formatting in uncompressed (idk why i thought that)

[podkall]

3 hours ago, Brandi93 said:

Given that an average full-length full HD movie for me is 2GB or 2048MB...

A 2TB Drive should hold a thousand or pretty close amount of movies by my calculations. 

like 500+ is more realistic, but yeah

[leclod]

While there exists (surprisingly) good encoded movies of 2-3GB, those are rare. Forget 3h movies (Dune, Tenet, John Wick...).

The average good size for HD(720) movies is 4.5GB, FullHD(1080) is 8.5GB.

A good encoded HD movie is good enough because FullHD won't do twice as good.

FullHD sized movies of 4.5GB are always worse than the equivalent HD sized movie of 4.5GB.

 

I'd go higher than 5TB and definitely higher than 2TB. Consider also, the more TBs, the cheaper the TB.

Around here a bare 18TB Toshiba HDD only costs 260.-, that's 14/TB.

 

And if you go 2TB, just go SSD, don't bother with slow, big, fragile, heavy and noisy HDD