fuzzyT Wrote: > I am running GigE w/ Jumbo packets to a ReadyNAS NV. And, no, the disc > accesses and transfers are not as fast as against a local drive. But > they are pretty good. And better for reads than writes, which is what > the scanner would be doing. And it remains to be seen whether the > combination of slower disc plus faster PC yields a faster or slower > scan. > > And despite the potential speed issue, I think running the scanner on > the PC rather than the NAS might still be a good approach. It's nice > if > the scan finishes quickly, but it may be more important that the NAS > is > not starved for cycles that might cause slowness in the SS user > interface. Absolutely. I'm just saying there's a tradeoff that will be a factor of scanning PC speed, network speed, and the speed of the computer/device with the music files. Given the low CPU power of the Infrants, it will probably be faster if you scan from a moderately powered PC.
One thing to realize in the scenario where you're running SlimServer on the NAS, is that the NAS also has to feed those files to the network at the same time. The Infrant doesn't have a separate CPU and a dedicated hardware RAID controller. Instead, they've taken their specialized storage processor and decided to run a general purpose operating system on it. That processor has to perform all of the disk and RAID I/O while doing whatever else you ask of it. Here's my setup: SlimServer: P4 3.0GHz, 2GB RAM Music Store: Infrant ReadyNAS 600 w/4 x 320GB drives Desktop: Athlon 64 X2 4400+, 2GB RAM Switch: SMC DGS-108 GigE, jumbo frames The P4 server pulls files from the NAS when scanning or streaming. Scanning is definitely slower than if the files were local, but still reasonable - about 25 minutes to scan 10,000 Flac files. I'm guessing I may be able to cut that down somewhat by moving the scanning process to the Athlon X2 desktop machine. As far as the benefits of Gigabit Ethernet. It's faster that 100 Mb Ethernet, but in the real world maybe not as much faster as you'd think. There a lot of other factors that go into how fast a machine can send or receive data across a network, particularly when reading or writing that data to disk. Any of the throughput numbers published by Infrant for their NASs are idealized, best possible test numbers obtained by transferring a single 1 gigabyte file using GigE with jumbo frames. A real world test of transferring, say, fifteen 25 MByte files (an album in Flac) will give much lower throughput numbers. -- JJZolx Jim ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JJZolx's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24523 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
