[fishypops]

I have just moved to UNRAID recently. On many shows and movies, I am experiencing large amounts of buffering, rendering viewing as being unwatchable.

Can anyone please set me on the right road to addressing this problem.

PC running Windows7
Eden
Server running UNRAID with a WD Black 1.0 GB, WD Green 1.0 GN and a @GB Parity (WD Green).

Thanks.

[PatK]

This might be a network issue, use the keyboard O while watching a video to see frames drop, CPU and GPU action to better understand the bottleneck.

[newoski]

Try adding a cache drive.

I found my buffering problems w XBMC + Unraid only happened when content was also being written to the server.

Adding a cache drive fixed this

[rocketpants]

A cache drive is definitely the way to go unless the server is only doing one thing at a time (e.g. serving up video to XBMC), however it does require a paid version of unRAID.

Does the buffering also occur if the video is played back in other applications (e.g. VLC)? Are there other "disk using things" running on the server such as transmission?

[mr.sparkle]

how fast is a copy/paste transfer?

and try serving from a single disk instead of a share - any faster?

[Skank]

A cache drive wont fix this. It doesnt do anything about read speed..

Even without cache drive you can stream full blurays from 2 places at the same time, soit must be your network connection or pc

[T800]

I can get mild buffering if XBMC is updating the library.
I have also had poor speed when a cable died giving me 10Mbs which ground the network to a halt making Windows 7 surprising bad in strange ways.
A motherboard failed giving me 100Mbs causing Blu-rays to buffer sometimes.

Telnet into the unRAID box and get the connected network speed:

Code:

ethtool  eth0

[newoski]

I'm sure you're right it doesn't affect read speeds, however, I've noticed that 99% of my read speed / buffering issues only happened when files were being written to the server.

By adding a cache drive, these problems went away, because the writes are not directly to the protected array.

(They are then moved from the cache drive to the protected array in the middle of the night, when i am unlikely to be reading from the server)