External HDD or SSD?

General
1

Hey all,
I am running out of space on portable SSD. Is a larger external HDD viable for scripts? I never thought that my video collection would amass to this, but VR has sent me down a rabbit hole. What are your thoughts on loading off an HDD? Do they load fairly quickly and scripts run fine?\

Thanks all!

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I don’t hink you’ll have issues regardless. I have an internal HDD and SSD and have run VR videos and scripts from both and not had issues. Currently, I run most things from a NAS (all on HDDs) and unless there is a random network glitch, which is infrequent, I have absolutely no issue playing VR videos with scripts.

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awesome, ty. i’ll wait on a sale and snag a large one. thank you.

4

Even the slowest modern hdd is more than capable of streaming VR. Do a little research on read rates vs bit rate if you’re worried.

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I’ll do so. I’m not the most tech literate when it comes to some of that stuff. Setting this up took weeks by itself lol.

Thanks for all your work as well. It’s because of your work that in looking at an external HDD!

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6

Haha. If you wanted to look at it super simply…

A terribly fragmented spinning hard drive should be able to read at least 50 megs a second. (In reality, you’ll be closer to 80-100 for large file reads over USB3)

50 megabytes per second =
3,000 megabytes per minute = 3 gigabytes
180,0000 megabytes per hour = 180 gigabytes

Imagine a 1 hour long video file being 180 gigabytes (!). As long as you’re under that size, the hard drive will be able to keep up. I see most 8K VR files clocking in at around 15-25 gigs per hour.

If you’re seeking and skipping around a file a TON, the spinning hard drive may take a little more time to start playing, but it won’t be really noticeable.

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Cheap spinning rust is plenty for videos and yah they really start eating up space thank god I have a network file server

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