Seperate Ethernet Switch

[TomBK]

eamonnb Wrote:It will only affect streaming ability - not audio quality.

Thanks eamonn

Being an all-in-one box user I wouldn't want to sacrifice perfection for simplicity

[little wong]

JasonSwain Wrote:The NAS is a slightly different story, it could be shared with other devices, and there is almost certainly no QoS guarantees in the NAS, so if you were doing a large file transfer from a fast source then you could hog the bandwidth and cause a dropout no matter what switch you have. The only way to prevent this is to dedicate the NAS to music serving and be careful when ripping CD's.

Have given this more thought and yes the NAS is where all the bandwidth will be required.
If I purchased a megabit switch and plugged my NAS into it and all my other devices I would assume this then solves the above issue.
The devices I have are all 100mbps, but the NAS has gigabyte connection so therefore it can communicate with the switch at a gigabyte and then each device could receive/send at it's maximum 100mbps capacity with the NAS.
Am I correct here?

[krisweir Linn Staff]

Yup - pretty much, although you'll be lucky to see even 100Mbps actual data-transfer speed to or from a NAS. This is basically limited by disk read/write speed.

Incidentally, I have tested (with Netgear ReadyNAS) transfering large volumes of data while simultaneously playing Linn Studio Masters on a DS system. No problem at all.

[RobD]

A good switch will let a NAS talk to the DS player, and your computer talk to the internet independently, without affecting either route. A 100Mb/s switch should let the NAS-DS connection operate fully at 100MB/s, and the computer-internet connection will also operate at that speed; the traffic on one route will not affect the throughput on the other route.

[little wong]

krisweir Wrote:Yup - pretty much, although you'll be lucky to see even 100Mbps actual data-transfer speed to or from a NAS. This is basically limited by disk read/write speed.

My Buffalo Mini NAS is quoted at 42MB/s read and 37MB/s write.
That's up to 336Mb/s, hence I assume it's got Gb LAN capability so therefore a Giga switch would help.

[krisweir Linn Staff]

I've got a Gigabit switch, and frequently transfer large amounts of data from a Buffalo (GigE) NAS to others (mainly QNAP & Netgear) NASes. I've never seen more than 120Mbps (15MBps) and usually more like half that on average.

Doesn't matter whether I use FTP or good old Windows mapped drives. My guess is that the PC is caching it all (probably on its disk) during the transfer. Try it yourself and see if you can do better!

Possibly if you hacked in on an SSH connection and ran FTP directly from the NAS OS you could beat this. Must try it some time...

[krisweir Linn Staff]

Here's an informative graph of GigE ReadyNAS write speed, optimised in various ways:
http://images.tomshardware.com/2006/03/0...re_big.png

As you can see below, it performs barely 50% better than 100M Ethernet.
(Note this graph doesn't show the 9K Jumbo or no journaling options.)
http://images.tomshardware.com/2006/03/0...re_big.png

If anyone has any tips on improving this - or experience of faster NAS technology I'd be very glad to hear from you!

Maybe this is the way to go:
http://www.open-e.com/products/nas-r3/

or even this: http://www.open-e.com/products/open-e-dss/

Obviously, it's a build-it-yourself solution, but for some big installations with lots of simultaneous streaming media feeds, may be the ticket?

[SeeDee12]

krisweir Wrote:Possibly if you hacked in on an SSH connection and ran FTP directly from the NAS OS you could beat this. Must try it some time...

Well, you don't have to hack in on SSH but FTP is definitely the fastest solution that I have seen. Something like FileZilla will double the throughput as it is simultaneously copying multiple files. I think that using Windows is causing some sort of caching as you mentioned and perhaps even virus scans etc. on the files.

One person on this forum mentioned using the "direct backup" feature on the NAS to move files between NAS drives.

[RobD]

krisweir Wrote:If anyone has any tips on improving this - or experience of faster NAS technology I'd be very glad to hear from you!

Hi,
The limit to the transfer speed is the speed of the disc - the write is the slowest operation. With a mirrored RAID, it will be a little slower as both discs must be written to. The answer is to buy the fastest discs that will go in the NAS (the NAS must be able to take plain discs, not proprietary ones). Tom's Hardware will tell you which discs are the fastest.

Do we need the speed?

Regards,
Rob.