HD100 and Network Attached Storage

[srothwell]

Does anyone know if the HD100 Extender will see an NAS box like the Dlink DNS-323 as a plain old drive?

Thinking out loud here... comments welcome :-)

After I rip a blu-ray movie and place it on the Sage server, it plays back great on the HD100, except it starts to hesitate form time to time and I think it's becuase the Sage server (where the m2ts file is stored) may be getting a bit backed up.

So I'm thinking if I put a NAS drive on the network, maybe that will help with the main Sage server's congestion?

If I put a NAS up, does it still have to go through the server or can the HD100 get data directly off the NAS?

[matt91]

it all goes through the server, IIRC.

[srothwell]

hmmmmm..... so I'm guessing that this will not be a solution that will help take any loads off the server?

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by srothwell

hmmmmm..... so I'm guessing that this will not be a solution that will help take any loads off the server?

No, even when you play the video from a NAS through SageTV to the HD100 the server first reads the file from the NAS and then transmits it back to the HD100. It would be nice if there could be a way for it to work like the SageTV Client where if the file is in a different network location than the server it will pull directly from that location rather than through the server. But because the HD100 works like a remote dumb terminal everything must go through the server.

[Berg]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

No, even when you play the video from a NAS through SageTV to the HD100 the server first reads the file from the NAS and then transmits it back to the HD100. It would be nice if there could be a way for it to work like the SageTV Client where if the file is in a different network location than the server it will pull directly from that location rather than through the server. But because the HD100 works like a remote dumb terminal everything must go through the server.

I too would really, really like the Extender to play directly from the NAS as opposed as the server. I have a nice healthy unRAID box and could store recorded show (like I do for movies) there instead of inside the server, but there is no benefit, and there is actually a performance hit to the network.

[stanger89]

Why is there no benefit to using a NAS when the content is streamed through the server?

[Berg]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Why is there no benefit to using a NAS when the content is streamed through the server?

Well, I might be oversimplifying things a little and I am not computer engineer, but here is my take -

There are definite advantages to using a NAS. This is why I am using the unRAID NAS package and could not be happier, but aside from the strict advantage of a NAS in terms of storage size, redundancy, appliance type storage OS, one of the benefits of using a NAS is to off-load the data storage to the appliance.

Unfortunately, I only use HD100 extenders now and to access the content to be displayed, the extender must get to content from the server, which gets it from the NAS.

This means that the data is transferred twice on the network before it is available to the extender, along with the data has to be processed twice by the server, increasing the server load. I'm doing that for movies, music and pictures because that's the best/only place I have enough storage.

It also means that if I decide to save my recorded show to the NAS (which is what I really wanted to do when I started recording HD. Unfortunately, the server would record the show to the NAS, transferring the data once on the network. Then, ShowAnalyser would access the show to do commercial detection which is transferring the data a second time. Then, when I viewed the show from the extender, the server would access the show from the NAS transferring the data a third time before moving the data a fourth time to the extender. This means the data would be handled four times over the network with the associated load on the server.

If the extender was able to access the show directly from the NAS, it would cut the load on the server and network in half for multimedia content, other than recorded shows and by 25% for shows.

IMHO, when I am trying to run an efficient server, that additional load is not worth it.

So I gave up on the advantages of a NAS for the show and instead store the recorded show locally.

[stanger89]

But that "load" you're worried about is about 1-2% throughput per HD stream, and probably far less than that in CPU overhead. So while true that there's more network traffic than necessary it's not anything significant.

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by stanger89

But that "load" you're worried about is about 1-2% throughput per HD stream, and probably far less than that in CPU overhead. So while true that there's more network traffic than necessary it's not anything significant.

Even with network traffic, on a gigabit network (which is so cheap anymore and a necessity if running a server) even a 1080i MPEG2 stream (about 20mbps) would only equate to 4% (20mbp in and 20mbps out)....

On my network, only DVD rips are stored on my Fileserver and those are only about 7mbps which puts my network load on my server at just over 1%...

Would it be nice if it could grab from a different source that going thru the server? Sure. Is there even a need? Not in my opinion.

[Berg]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

Even with network traffic, on a gigabit network (which is so cheap anymore and a necessity if running a server) even a 1080i MPEG2 stream (about 20mbps) would only equate to 4% (20mbp in and 20mbps out)....

On my network, only DVD rips are stored on my Fileserver and those are only about 7mbps which puts my network load on my server at just over 1%...

Would it be nice if it could grab from a different source that going thru the server? Sure. Is there even a need? Not in my opinion.

I think I understand all that, but ... if you will, here is my concern. The server is recoding two programs from my R5000 in 1080i, and one or two other shows are being recorded in SD. While this is going on, ShowAnalyzer is processing (and therefore accessing from the NAS) two shows and two of the three extenders are watching shows.

My concerns is that there is eight "data stream" going thru the server which seems like more than I want. I haven't tried it mind you, but even my Gig network and decent MD would be working hard. Don't you think ?

My two cents.

[thomaszoo]

If my server wasn't recording it wouldn't even be on to watch recordings which is an energy efficient way of watching content. This is one of the biggest reasons I haven't spent the $ on NAS. Hopefully a firmware update could change this or a hardware update when the HD-200 is released.

Right now it seems like a lot of needless energy is used for a server that shouldn't be necessary. I know there are ways to build more energy efficient servers, but I don't believe any would equal that of the HD-100 and NAS.

Wayne

[MrD]

I'd say you are trading one form of IO (file IO) for another (network IO). In addition you are now at the mercy of the NAS implementation of file and network IO.

So there are lots of combinations here. The one where you come out ahead is where the NAS server has better file IO and better / equivalent network IO to your sage server.

I am not sure a consumer NAS will meet expectations, depending of course the number of concurrent streams.

[stanger89]

The problem with reading directly from the extender is you need to impliment CIFS (or NFS or something) and user accounts/credentials on the extender (and all the associated overhead) in order to access a CIFS share.

The streaming doesn't go to the servers HDD, it's just strait through, so all you save by reading directly is a little bit of aggregate bandwidth on the switch/server connection and a tiny bit of server CPU power.

[AzJazz]

Food for thought -

On my system, I have a 1TB NAS drive, 2 internal SATA drives (1 for my OS, 1 for SageTV storage), and 1 internal PATA drive. My NAS is connected to my GB LAN, with the MTU size increased (which significantly improved my NAS data transfers).

For this test, I flushed my RAM prior to every transfer, to make sure that RAM-based transfers were minimized. I used the same size file (700 MB) for every transfer.

• SATA => PATA: 17 seconds
• PATA => SATA: 11 seconds
• SATA 1 => SATA 2: 21 seconds
• SATA => NAS: 85 seconds
• PATA => NAS: 65 seconds
• NAS => SATA: 46 seconds
• NAS => PATA: 44 seconds

And, in a nutshell, that is why I use internal drives only. Regardless of CPU utilization - which appears to only be about 1-2% (when writing to a separate SATA drive from my OS), the writing from my SATA drive to the NAS takes 4 times longer, and reading takes 2 times longer.

AzJazz

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by AzJazz

Food for thought -

On my system, I have a 1TB NAS drive, 2 internal SATA drives (1 for my OS, 1 for SageTV storage), and 1 internal PATA drive. My NAS is connected to my GB LAN, with the MTU size increased (which significantly improved my NAS data transfers).

For this test, I flushed my RAM prior to every transfer, to make sure that RAM-based transfers were minimized. I used the same size file (700 MB) for every transfer.

Interesting data, but not as interesting as within context:

• SATA => PATA: 17 seconds - 41MB/sec (329Mbps)
• PATA => SATA: 11 seconds - 63MB/sec (509Mbps)
• SATA 1 => SATA 2: 21 seconds - 33MB/sec (266Mbps)
• SATA => NAS: 85 seconds - 8MB/sec (65Mbps)
• PATA => NAS: 65 seconds - 10MB/sec (86Mbps)
• NAS => SATA: 46 seconds - 15MB/sec (121Mbps)
• NAS => PATA: 44 seconds - 15MB/sec (127Mbps)

Even the worst case, writing to the NAS is still 3-4x more than is necessary for streaming even HD. Assuming reading from the NAS, you can double that.

But really that misses the whole point of the OP's question, and that is regardless of how fast (or not) you can write to/from a NAS vs local drive, there's no significant hit in the data passing through the PC vs not.