Home media center
I just bought a NetGear ReadyNas Duo to connect hard drives to my home network, to stream movies and the like to our fabulous Xbox Classic media center. In the process of researching, I was wondering whether the kind of hard drive connection matters. I mean, if you plug USB hard drives into a device like that, does it run fast enough to stream one or more movies simultaneously? How many simultaneous movies or audio streams would your average home ethernet carry? My first stab at answering these questions are below.
On the left are various network and hard drive connection technologies. On the right are various uses to which I might want to put them. You can't use a slower connection (eg. bluetooth) to drive a faster usage (eg. blu-ray quality movies). Centre column is the data rate in megabits per second (Mb/s):
| Channel | Bandwidth (Mb/s) |
Media |
|---|---|---|
| EDGE mobile phone | 0.2 | |
| 0.3 | CD audio | |
| Bluetooth1 | 0.7 | |
| 1.3 | Minimal video | |
| Bluetooth2 | 2.1 | |
| Wifi 802.11b | 4.5 | |
| 5.0 | DVD mpeg-2 quality | |
| ADSL1 | 8.0 | |
| Ethernet 10baseT | 10.0 | |
| USB1 | 12.0 | |
| 15.0 | HDTV video (from 8 to 15) | |
| ADSL2+ ⭐️ | 24.0 | |
| Cable modem | 30.0 | |
| 40.0 | Blu-ray disc | |
| Wifi 802.11g | 54.0 | |
| Firewire800 act | 65.0 | |
| Ethernet 100baseT ⭐️ | 100.0 | |
| PCI | 133.0 | |
| USB2 actual | 240.0 | |
| Firewire 400 theo | 400.0 | |
| USB2 theoretical | 480.0 | |
| Wifi 802.11n | 600.0 | |
| Firewire 800 theo | 800.0 | |
| Seagate Barracuda ⭐️ | 960.0 | |
| Ethernet gigabit | 1,000.0 | |
| SATA-150 theo | 1,500.0 | |
| SATA-300 theo | 3,000.0 |
⭐️ = my setup
I'm assuming that I don't have gigabit ethernet, because I've never paid it any attention in the past. Judging from the above, my 100BaseT should be more than adequate, but will be the weakest link. So that'll be the first thing I look at if streaming seems sub-par. Coolio!
Update: Everything works swimmingly. I've had no problem with streaming speeds. Problems have occurred with some .avi files which appeared to have invalid interleave cross-stream differential parity (or something) and efforts to reverse their polarity were to no avail (transcoding software generally wouldn't even read the files!) A quick visit or two to MiniNova fixed all that.