Streaming iTunes content from a USB drive

[richpjr]

I will shortly be receiving a new i7 iMac to replace my aging Mac Pro. I have a couple of TB of movies and music that I had on an internal drive in the Mac Pro that I used to stream to an Apple TV in another room. Since I am losing all of the drive bays I had with my Mac Pro, I am looking at external drives to use on the iMac. I was wondering how a USB drive would handle streaming movies and music. That is about the only thing that would be on the disk. Would it be fast enough? Or would it stutter? Or should I bite the bullet and go for a fire wire drive? I have a USB enclosure that I can use for it and when my Mac comes I can obviously try it, but was wondering if anyone was doing something similar.

 

[spinnerlys]

USB 2.0 with its transfer rates of over 25MB/s and bursts of 35MB/s will totally suffice to stream audio content with a data rate of 40KB/s (320Kbit/s compressed MP3 for example) or video content with a data rate of 1 or 2 MB/s, if it is 1080p/i and using some MPEG-4 codec to encode its video.

 

[bossxii]

I've had this setup for a while now. I've used USB, FW and USB into my Airport wirelessly. Never an issue.