[u6s68]

I am on a 20mb connection and I am looking to buy a Netgear N300 router so that I can plug a HDD into it and share my library throughout the house without a NAS or another computer?

Will this be possible and practical or will speed restrictions be a constraint?

Currently using Plex Media Server on a laptop when I want to share my library throughout the house. With a Networked HDD could I eliminate the need to boot my laptop up

[Bosse_B]

Why don't you just plug the HDD into the Raspberry Pi?
You will of course need to use a powered hub because the Pi USB is not capable of supplying power to a hard drive.
You could presumably configure Linux on that to allow sharing the files on the drive.
BTW: This forum is really about XBMC and in particular this subforum is about XBMC on Raspberry Pi....

[u6s68]

I run a portable hdd off my Pi and it works okay on my power hungry tv. My low powered tv causes it to reboot. Both scenarios have the Pi powered by the tvs' usb port.

The reason I don't want to connect the HDD to the Pi is that I have multiple rooms with Pis I want to stream to.

[bac522]

Power you Pi with a good 2A USB PS and that will fix the rebooting problem of the Pi. It's not good for the Pi to reboot without a proper shutdown, at some point you're CF card will become corrupt. Otherwise the Netgear box will do what you're looking for...or you could just get a second Pi to do the same thing.

[u6s68]

Will it be extremely slow to stream a file over wifi? Plex Media Server handles it like a champ. Even streaming to two different rooms at the same time. I want to take my laptop out of the equation.

[bac522]

Will it be extremely slow to stream a file over wifi? Plex Media Server handles it like a champ. Even streaming to two different rooms at the same time. I want to take my laptop out of the equation.

No, you should have plenty of bandwidth on 802.11n, the only issue I see with people having problems with wi-fi is if they are surround by a bunch of neighbors access points causing interference, but most of the time you can find a cleaner frequency to use. Compressed movies in mkv or mp4 format use will under 5mbps of bandwidth. 1080i and/or bluray in native compress format are around 20mbps, but a clean 802.11n signal should have no problem with streaming even a 20mbps stream. I use wi-fi to stream to pc's and my minix G4 from my Pi and it works fine.

[miappa]

The problem that can occur is the USB throughput on the router which in general are very slow on such devices.
As I explained in the other thread u6s68 asked the same question, write speeds on such devices are usually very slow, read should be ok for streaming.
I have the predecessor to that router and I used USB harddrives previously. Couldn´t get write speed higher than ≈2MB/s and read somewhere around 5-8MB/s when using ext3. NTFS (≈500kb/s) and FAT (<1MB/s) was just a pain and HFS not supported at all.
But that was an older version though.

Might as well put the HDD in Pi and share it from there, will probably be faster or just as slow.

[u6s68]

Thanks. Not sure how to go about this but I will have a look around.