Media Server Question

A

Azhar

Fixing stupid since 1972
Joined
Jan 9, 2001
Messages
18,877
I'm looking to ditch the BlackArmor NAS in my sig by pulling the two 2TB drives out and use it to build a media server after performing some tests last night. The BlackArmor is not capable of more than 17MBps transfer rate, which is bad for Blu-ray rips. It was fine for all of my DVD collection on multiple media centers, but it cannot play even one Blu-ray. The reason behind the slow NAS is because of BlackArmor's piss slow 800MHz ARM processor

I moved a Blu-ray rip to another computer to test it out and it played fine on all of my media centers, even simultaneously at 15% CPU and 4.8% network utilization, with 3 media centers streaming it together. That test computer is an older Athlon64 x2 4200+ with 2GB of RAM and a gigabit ethernet card.

My question is this: since the media storage is going to be on a lot, it needs to be cool and quiet. Would a media storage server with an Intel Atom processor have enough I/O to push Blu-ray rips through several computers? Or would it be safe to use something faster, like the Pentium Dual Core or Celeron HP MediaSmart server?
 
You sure that isn't 17mb/s and not 17mbit? 17mbit would mean you can barely do 2mb/s. I've never seen a NAS unit that is that slow. If it is in fact 17mb/s, then that is more than sufficient for streaming any video you might have.
 
I'm sure it's 17MB/s. Trust me, the Seagate BlackArmor NAS is a real POS. I found out the hard way :-P

Regardless, when playing ripped Blu-rays off of it, it plays as a slide show. Playing Blu-ray rips off of a shared folder from another computer plays flawlessly. So throughput doesn't really make any difference, it's not playing. Could be that the ARM processor in the NAS isn't strong enough to push Blu-ray.
 
17mb/s should be more than sufficient. A raw blu-ray rip is only ~6mb/s.
 
Sometimes, things just choke on streaming media. For example, my main rig has dual RealTek gigabit NICs and PCIe Intel NICs. I can have one ethernet cable plugged into the RealTek and get stuttering video. Conversely I can take that same cable out, plug it into the Intel NIC and see smooth video. Both target and host are Core i7 920 machines with 12GB of ram.
 
I find that the Giga Lan had a more positive affect on my setup, then when i was running 10/100
 
midnkight said:
I find that the Giga Lan had a more positive affect on my setup, then when i was running 10/100
Click to expand...

All of my computers and NAS are gigabit ethernet.

Anyways, the problem seems to be gone. I'm not sure what's up, but last night the NAS pushed the Blu-ray rips flawlessly to two of my media centers simultaneously. It must have been really busy with something when I first tested it out.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top