Both devices run Linux so you can do other random server tasks with them if you like. Pogoplug is available cheap right now, cheaper than a Pi, and comes with a case and power supply – and this can do at least 10MB/s. For example, Seagate Dockstar (discontinued, but you still might find one), was available for about $35 when it was in production, can do about 20MB/s, which is not even possible for the Pi hardware. However I think performance of the Pi as a NAS will not be good compared to other low-end boxes that would be suitable for this. You might need a large-ish buffer on your playback device if the performance is inconsistent, but it doesn't require all that much average bandwidth. Oh and as for streaming, if we take raw BluRay as the top possible content bitrate, as long as you can maintain an average of 40mbit or so you'll be fine. It'll work, but it's not really designed for it, and won't compete with devices that are. Point is that I wouldn't be optimistic about the Pi being any good at this.
YMMV, we'll have a better idea when people actually have boards, but I'd say expecting 100mbit is optimistic due to the USB contention, and that's still slow. For serious use, I recommend an Atom-based server. Basically I don't find anything less than 1Gbps satisfactory, though I agree that you won't get it out of a cheap box. Sorry I didn't mean to confuse the two ideas. I don't think it is unreasonable to ask 200Mbps out of a USB 2.0 bus, however the processor may be the limiting factor but we won't know until the device comes out.
So even if a R-Pi running as a NAS box doubles my performance to 96Mbps (12 MBps) I will be happy. I got the router and decided to try out its "Media Server" functions and soon after started ripping all my DVD and BluRay library to it. Why use it? Because before it I had no idea how useful a NAS was.
Seagate dockstar as a nas Pc#
It takes me 2 to 4 hours to tansfer a ripped BluRay from my PC to that server, and if you do the math you will see that there isn't enough bandwidth to play all HD movies. That same HDD connected to a USB 3.0 port on my PC gets at worst 800 Mbps (100 MBps) and has done much better sometimes. The most bandwidth I can get from that HDD is 48 Mbps (6 MBps) on a good day and around half that when there is more going on with the network. I have a Cisco e4200 and it has a MIPS processor running at 480MHZ and 64MB ram. For some of us using a usb HDD attached to a router a R-Pi would be a healthy increase. A low end NAS will never saturate a 1Gb ethernet connection.
Seagate dockstar as a nas 1080p#
I'd expect it to work fine for 1080p streaming and generic file serving duties, but I also suspect it will be slower than the dedicated boxes for this that you can buy for around the same price. I think the USB NIC itself can just about do that, but with contention on the bus for the hard drive, I think it will come down considerably, and who knows how the SoC itself will cope, it's not designed for high throughput. Set up correctly with decent hardware you can get about 110MB/s out of GigE, which brings that down to just over a minute.Īnd I for one really doubt that the Pi will even be able to reach it's theoretical performance limit of ~100mbit while doing data transfer from USB. I don't know about you, but I'm far too impatient to be happy with 10+ minutes to copy a 1080p rip to my file server. For a file server I'd say 1Gbps these days is a virtual necessity.
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