External Hard drive buffer

dss · 1 Dec 2007 at 18:42

A while ago i bought a Western Digital Elements 320GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive, which i formatted to NTFS. I have around 170GB of data on it. But when i try to watch a video which is over 30 mins, every 10-15 mins, it pauses, and needs to wait for the video to buffer. The videos are only 192kbps or smaller. And the drive is running through my USB2 into the mobo. Im running windows vista 32 bit with a AMD2ghz 939, 2gb ram. And i run all the videos on VLC player, with no other applications using the external drive.
Is there anything i can do to stop the hard drive from buffering during video play back? thanks

fobose · 1 Dec 2007 at 20:29

Have you tried another program to play them in?

dss · 7 Dec 2007 at 17:50

yeh, same problem

Mattus · 7 Dec 2007 at 21:51

Sounds like the HD is powering down after a period of time - then when VLC needs to read the next part of the movie, it has to wait for the HD to spin up before it can access it. You need to find some way of preventing the HD from spinning down. You could see if there's an option in the drive's software to control the power-down time, or else try playing around with Windows power profiles?

platinum87 · 8 Dec 2007 at 02:22

mabye put it inside the pc??, if possible

Bloodust · 8 Dec 2007 at 09:33

platinum87 said:
mabye put it inside the pc??, if possible

Then its not an external drive anymore