Quote:
Originally Posted by norkmeister
Is USB 2 throughput really good enough for a dual HD tuner?
I've been running a single PCI tuner in my HTPC for 3 years now, but am sick of the occasional time when I want to record something and watch something else so am looking for a dual tuner. I don't want to buy a PCI card since I want to future proof the tuner for any box replacement, so am looking at USB.
Further to this, do you think that with a USB dual tuner writing its recordings to an external HDD. Is anyone doing this?
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Don't know about the external drive (& I'd think it wouldn't be a good idea), but USB is fine for tuners. I ran 3 for ages (2 years) without an issue (with 3 concurrent HD recordings).
USB has a number of different transfer modes for different devices. Things like tuners get the highest priority as they need constant bandwidth, while other devices that only need the odd burst here & there are shuffled down the queue & their job gets done when the bandwidth is available. In theory this means that a print job to a USB printer might have to wait for a recording to finish, but in practice, the delays are microscopic & the bandwidth is never actually maxed out, so it's not an issue.
Justin
