NAS throughput enough for Blu-Ray iso?

T

The Gonz

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 24, 2004
Messages
1,131
First let me give a big thanks to the veterans here. The knowledge you all share has been invaluable to me and has helped me take the plunge into the world of the HTPC.

I currently have
AMD Sargas unlocked to X2 440e
GIGABYTE 785GMT-UD2H
4 GB DDR3-1333 RAM
Blu-Ray drive
30GB Vertex OS drive.
Hauppauge 2250

I am loving it as it pulls 50watts at idle and 70watts at load.

I have been doing a lot of research into NAS. I understand they are mostly underpowered thanks to the wimpy processor inside them so that even with the gigabit network connection they only hit about 31 MB/s throughput. (Or is it 31 Mb/s? Reviews are unclear and vary)

Here is my question:
I prefer to back up my blu-rays to iso's so I can watch them from any networked PC in the house which would be uber cool.
Can a NAS push enough data to get the job done? Has anyone done this?

It seems like it is close and looking at NAS' like the D-Link 323 I am unsure if they could stream the data fast enough to prevent skipping.

I know a WHS could do the trick and then some but I am not quite ready for that yet and would prefer something simpler to manage.


Sorry for the long winded post, I wanted to be clear about how I intend to use the NAS. Thank you to all who reply.
 
I don't see why not. PATA drives can do Blu-ray ISO, so I don't see why Gigabit LAN can't handle the throughput either.

I've tried running Blu-ray directly from a Blu-ray drive from another computer to a networked computer and that didn't quite work out too well. It stuttered like hell lol
 
The problem is not the Gigabit connection but the NAS. Or so I believe.
It is like a mini PC with its own CPU and RAM and the CPU is what I have been reading, holds it back. In some cases the NAS is slower than a regular PATA drive and are really only intended for network backups and not streaming hi-def iso's.

I was hoping someone out there may have experience with this they can share to help me make a more informed decision.
 
Yeah I didn't think of that. I was thinking of it as an external drive rather than a NAS.
 
BluRay only peaks at 3-4MB/s, you'll be fine even on a poorly performing NAS. About the only 'solution' that wouldn't work is one of those routers with a USB port that can act as a NAS like the Apple Airport Extreme or some ASUS models. Any dedicated NAS should be able to do it fine, though you might find copying the ISOs over there in the first place takes longer than you like...

IMO you get more for less building a small Atom-based (or even full Celeron/Sempron based) PC and tossing in a decent NIC and some NAS OS on it. Should cost around the same as a dedicated NAS box, will use a bit more power, but you get to add more disks and it will perform much better.
 
I checked out the Blu ray web site and some of my favorite Blu-rays seem to peak at 40 Mb/s, roughly 5MB/s. Not too bad.

I believe the trouble occurs if I want to watch one blu-ray iso while my wife in another room wants to watch another one.

Have you had this situation? Can it keep up or is it one movie at a time?
 
pick up a hp mediavault. they are running a decently speced cpu in them. or toss together your own nas/fileserver.
 
The Gonz said:
I checked out the Blu ray web site and some of my favorite Blu-rays seem to peak at 40 Mb/s, roughly 5MB/s. Not too bad.
Click to expand...

Performance with these NAS boxes is generally shit, but most of them can do at least 20MB/s or so provided you have a GigE network. In which case you shouldn't have any trouble. The speed of these boxes is definitely limited by the wimpy onboard embedded CPU and not the disks.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top