Network storage noob - Buffalo Linkstation content

Cyrus

Morning all,

bit of a noob with all of this so bear with me.

I received a 1tb Buffalo Linkstation yesterday from Amazon.

I have UPC BB and a netgear wireless router. So the Linkstation is connected to the wireless router which is obviously connected to the UPC modem.

I appear to have set everything up ok, i can access the networked drive from my laptop, my ps3 and my jailbroken apple tv running xbmc.

Last night then i set about transferring my 85gb of video files from an external usb2.0 harddrive to the network drive, so i attached the ext hd to my laptop and set it to copy over. That took 11 hours, am i correct in thinking that thats a t/fer rate of 2.1mb/s?

If so, is that very slow? im assuming that transferring from an ext hd adds more time to this task?

Would it make more sense then, when d/l a file from the internet in future to d/l it directly to the network drive, and / or use the built in torrent client?

another thing i noticed, and it was still transferring files from the ext HDD to the network drive, was that opening large video files (by large i mean 1-2gig) on the apple tv was slow and the playback was chugging, is that to do with the transfer or is that a bigger issue? apple tv is connected to the network wirelessly.

anything else i should be aware of let me know

Voodu Child

Wireless networks are very slow unfortunately.

You havent given any specs at all for any of your equipment, so all I can say is that throughputs in the low MB/s numbers are pretty normal for a basic home network. You can get higher speeds with the right equipment and settings but without knowing your setup its impossible to say if you are getting the max out of your setup.

Those kind of speeds should be enough for SD streaming, and maybe the lower end of HD streaming. But it depends on a lot of factors and also what else is happening in the network.

You definitely don't want to try wirelessly streaming videos at the same time as wirelessly transferring content onto the NAS. A radio can't transmit and receive at the same time, it has to do one and then the other. So if you are trying to send a lot of data one way (to the NAS) and also send it the other way (to the Apple TV) it will cut speeds down a lot.

Cyrus

Voodu Child wrote: »

Wireless networks are very slow unfortunately.

You havent given any specs at all for any of your equipment, so all I can say is that throughputs in the low MB/s numbers are pretty normal for a basic home network. You can get higher speeds with the right equipment and settings but without knowing your setup its impossible to say if you are getting the max out of your setup.

Those kind of speeds should be enough for SD streaming, and maybe the lower end of HD streaming. But it depends on a lot of factors and also what else is happening in the network.

You definitely don't want to try wirelessly streaming videos at the same time as wirelessly transferring content onto the NAS. A radio can't transmit and receive at the same time, it has to do one and then the other. So if you are trying to send a lot of data one way (to the NAS) and also send it the other way (to the Apple TV) it will cut speeds down a lot.

thanks a million, yeah id guessed it was an issue transferring and streaming at the same time

would i have the same issue if using the inbuilt bitorrent client?

my network equipment is modest stuff so it sounds about right then, im sure id get better speeds if i connected via ethernet

silvine

Are homeplugs faster than wireless N?

Voodu Child

silvine wrote: »

Are homeplugs faster than wireless N?

Not necessarily. They're both pretty variable depending on the spec of the devices and various other factors (reception, house wiring etc). And they can get different speeds depending on what you're trying to do, whether you are talking about send or receive etc.

High-end consumer routers (eg Linksys E3000) seem to max out at about 80Mbps throughput on the 5GHz band in most reviews ive seen - that's under short distances and ideal circumstances, plus of course a very good 5GHz wireless card to match. Your average household doesnt have anything close to this though, most people are just using whatever router their ISP gave them and whatever wireless cards came with their computer/laptop.

There's a few 450Mbps routers on the market, they perform a little better (100Mbps+) but they're pretty new and there's not many 450Mbps wifi cards on the market yet.

The best 200Mbps homeplugs get about 40-50Mbps throughput in reviews, however the 'average' 200Mbps homeplug (ie a cheapy one using older chipset) would be lucky to get half that.

There's some 500Mbps powerline products just hitting the market. Netgear have some and they perform pretty well in most tests, ive heard people get actual throughput of 80Mbps or slightly higher. Again, very dependent on local factors.