Metspitzer said:
Anyone know how the speed of a stand alone NAS compares to an external
drive plugged into a WDTV player?
A WDTV USB2 interface ?
That can't go faster than ~30MB/sec. That's USB2 for you.
You consider the hardware paths first, to understand
whether it's going to go faster. For example, if the
WDTV has a 10/100BT NIC on it, it can't do more than
about 12.5 MB/sec over that (i.e. 100 divided by 8).
I don't know what model of WDTV player, whether it has
Wifi, Ethernet, USB2, USB3, what the NAS has for interfaces
etc. There's a lotta hardware to consider.
Top speed is limited by the disk. Which for a cheap disk,
is around 125-135MB/sec. But the other hardware interfaces
will surely get in the way. The very worst of NAS boxes,
transfer at 10MB/sec, even though the disk does 135MB/sec.
There's a whole web site dedicated to benchmarking NAS boxes.
And your WDTV doesn't even need to pull data that fast.
An HD movie is compressed, by a factor of 100 or so, so
the data rate coming across hardware paths, is puny.
Maybe it stutters, because the WDTV box doesn't have
a good enough "decompresser" when it plays content ?
Maybe instead of 1080p you're supposed to run it
at 720p ? Something like that.
While you could try feeding it some sort of raw
uncompressed AVI format, that would be kinda silly.
You feed it a diet of what it was designed for.
If it "likes" MPEG2, you feed it MPEG2.
Paul
