NAS might be the bottleneck (1 Viewer)

[Michael7]

Hi all,
Im getting together a mediacenter for under the tv and Im going to be using a Dell 755 2.33 core 2 duo 4GB ram and an ATI 5450. I have a Peak twintuner but got the loan of a TBS 5280 HD twintuner which on a trial run worked with no problems. I had Vista running on an old harddrive which had to go (whats all the drive grinding about??), got Win7 and a 120GB SSD. Im about to put it all together but am a bit concerned about the Dlink 320 NAS which is a cheapy. I want the NAS to store everything but wonder if it could cope with 2 channels recording while watching a prerecord. I could take the NAS out altogether and use an old Asus server (not sure but I think its dual core 2Ghz AMD) which my brother says I could have but would like to keep the equipment level down, lol. I wanted the Dell to be a standalone box but would use the Asus server as the backend if the Dell couldnt cope. All replies appreciated, thanks.

Michael

 

[mm1352000]

Hello Michael

Personally I would never recommend recording or timeshifting directly to or from a NAS. The additional latency and potential inconsistency in accessing the NAS over the network can be problematic at times. Moving recordings to the NAS after they're completed is fine. Just wouldn't recommend direct recording to the NAS. Try an old HDD for recording, and consider a RAMdisk for timeshifting.

Regards,
mm

 

[Zuzler]

Why not just get a cheap ~80GB SSD and use that one for timeshifting? Maybe you can also configure other programs to use it as extra cache.

 

[Michael7]

Thanks for the advice. I got a hold of the Asus server which is an Athlon 64 x2, 2.6Ghz with 2GB of ram. Its a shuttle but I think 2 SATA drives could squeeze in. Im going to have 1 drive for mediaportal and 1 for recording to see how it gets on. Yes, using a SSD might be a good idea as this shuttle can only take a max of 4GB memory. Just out of curiosity, how much space would be needed if a HD channel was paused for 20Mins?

 

[mm1352000]

Just out of curiosity, how much space would be needed if a HD channel was paused for 20Mins?

That depends entirely on the bitrate of the channel and how many simultaneous clients you will have.

 

[regeszter]

how much space would be needed if a HD channel was paused for 20Mins

X = bitrate of the channel in Mb/s

timeshift space in MB for each client = 20 * 60 * X / 8

 

[Michael7]

Thanks for the help guys. I got it all up and running, just waiting for the remote to come through the post.
A rough spec is:-
Server is a shuttle - Athlon 64 x2, 2.6Ghz with 2GB of ram. A SD Peak USB twin tuner. Theres two harddrives in it, one for mediaportal and one for recording
Client is a Dell 755 2.2Ghz core2duo with 4GB ram, a 120GB SSD and an ATI 5450 video card.
Both are linked by homeplugs.
Theres a 6 - 7 second delay in playing a recorded show which might be the 2nd harddrive spinning up but I dont know too much about mediaportal yet, any ideas?

Michael