flexraid and streaming

M

muell

n00b
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Feb 9, 2011
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Im thinking about setting up flexraid transparent raid on our server computer in the basement.
currently it has two wd red 4tb drives mirrored in windows and im wanting to increase size and hoping to increase speed also. We stream to 4 different apple tv's in the house and id like to speed up the time it takes for the apple tv to find and start playing the media. Some of the larger files 8gb will buffer for over a minute before they begin playing. Will switching to transparent raid with four 4tb drives be faster than the mirrored drive I have now?
 
What are you using for both front end and back end software for the streaming? XBMC, Plex etc? Are the ATV's connected via Ethernet or WIFI (most buffering issues are network related).
 
two of the atv's are wifi two ethernet. Netflix and hulu stream fine to all in hd. Server computer is running win7 with itunes. These are Atv 3 so no jailbreak. Im really thinking my issue is the fact that im reading from 5400rpm wd red drives in raid one. But I dont want to upgrade to a differnet more complicated form of raid if Im not going to see any performance increase.
 
SirMaster said:
The issue is not RAID 1 of WD Reds. Even a single WD Red is over 100MB/s.
Click to expand...

Not so fast there... that speed only applies to sequential reads. Four streams at once would do interesting things to the read speed given it'll be seeking all over the place.
 
OK, but even a full BluRay is only at most 40mbps. So 4 streams would at most require 160mbps which is only 20MB/s. I don't see how a disk couldn't keep up with that.

And with buffering it should not have to seek around all that much. Just every couple seconds which is really not much for a hard disk to do.
 
SirMaster said:
OK, but even a full BluRay is only at most 40mbps. So 4 streams would at most require 160mbps which is only 20MB/s. I don't see how a disk couldn't keep up with that.

And with buffering it should not have to seek around all that much. Just every couple seconds which is really not much for a hard disk to do.
Click to expand...

I agree with this comment. Is it slow with one user streaming? I don't understand the first statement in terms of how long it takes apple tv to "find" the media. What is the network bandwidth to the apple TV's?
 
If you use FlexRaid Transparent RAID, it will be significantly slower then the regular speed of a single drive. It will probably be much slower then your Windows Raid 1 Mirror.
 
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