[duckson]

Current setup is a Netgear Readynas Duo with 2 x 2TB drives, I use a Dune B1 media player in the lounge to playback the BD-ISO rips (ripped as either movie only (inc HD audio) or the full disc) from the Readynas.

The Readynas also has some files backed up from my laptop (digi camera pics and video, various programs etc).

As its getting full I’m looking to replace the Readynas with more storage and thought of killing 2 birds with 1 stone as I need a media player in the back room, so speccing a HTPC/Server combi.

I have put together a spec below but if this won’t do the job then please advise. I don’t have a massive budget, £300-400 ideally but could go a bit more if it absolutely needed it.

One concern is that testing with my laptop (Core2Duo 1.4GHz ULV (circa 1000 CPU marks on cpubenchmark.net) and separate ATI graphics card using XBMC Frodo or PowerDVD v10) and the Dune has shown there to be stuttering playing back 2 BD-ISO rips from my NAS simultaneously (my LAN is gigabit), this occurs with either both playing the same file or different files. I have also hosted a BD-ISO on my laptop and played it on there as well as on the Dune (ie reading the same file) and they both haven’t run perfectly, still stuttering. Note they both play the BD-ISO fine if playing them back on their own.

Should faultless playback of the files (either the same or different files but from the same storage area) to 2 or more different media players simultaneously be possible?

Proposed HTPC/server spec;

Intel Celeron G550 2.6GHz dual core
Gigabyte GA-Z77M-D3H Intel Z77 mATX
4GB DDR3 RAM 1600MHz CAS 9
2TB WD Green HDD 3.5”
2 x 2TB Seagate Green HDD’s 3.5” (from my Readynas)
Liteon BDROM
Silverstone GD06B mATX case
Silverstone ST50F-ES-230 PSU 

I would be using the onboard GFX, OS will be Win7 Pro 64 bit (I have a spare copy) and I was thinking of using Drivebender software to duplicate some of the files across the discs rather than RAID.


Thanks for any help/advice!

[Rick P.]

Absolutely. The fileserver side takes nothing resource-wise so it looks like something's up with your network or maybe your data drive(s) if you've got stuttering. My old server had a lowly Sempron 145 CPU that could saturate my Gb network all day long at maybe a 10% cpu load. This was pulling data from a linux software RAID 5 array.
Are you using samba for filesharing? I believe its overhead is higher and it is much slower than nfs without tuning but you should still be able to stream a couple ISOs without issue.

[duckson]

Thanks.

Tried it again reading the BD-ISO's from the Readynas but used my normal method of NFS for the Dune (used SMB before) and just picked the file from the Readynas using the browser on my laptop (guess this would be SMB?), both seemed to play ok then.
After a bit of looking into it it seems my Dune doesnt like playing files by SMB (read test pulls 11MB/s though which is the max for its 100mbit port), it stutters on its own via SMB but is fine via NFS.

How would i play a file from my laptop to the Dune but using NFS? Do i need an NFS server or something running on the laptop? (Win7 Pro x64 on the laptop).

[Rick P.]

How would i play a file from my laptop to the Dune but using NFS? Do i need an NFS server or something running on the laptop? (Win7 Pro x64 on the laptop).

I believe you do. I only use Windows for work but did set this up on (I think) a Windows 7 Pro machine machine and recall having to install a 250 MB or so network utilities package from Microsoft's website. You shouldn't have to install all the utilities just for nfs though.