I have about 500 GB of video data that I currently store on mixture of external USB and independant internal SATA drives. I am thinking about devising a new configuration, but I want to set something up that will give me the best performance for serving up these video files. I am most concerned with making sure that the disk configuration is able to provide adequate throughput to keep up with the high bit rate of this video and provide smooth playback. I have considered RAID 0 configurations (keeping in mind the potential of data loss if not backed up). Is this the best option? Any suggestions?
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Video Server: Disk System Advice
- Thread starter oppewalj
- Start date
unhappy_mage
[H]ard|DCer of the Month - October 2005
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Is this compressed video, or original? Over network, anything compressed with a modern codec (or even mpeg-2 
) will be low enough bitrate to play smoothly with no problems. Even USB1.1 isn't usually a barrier here. Even DVDs only go up to 10 mbit. Think about that.
) will be low enough bitrate to play smoothly with no problems. Even USB1.1 isn't usually a barrier here. Even DVDs only go up to 10 mbit. Think about that.I guess one of my other goals was to get all this data from these random disks on to something a little more tidy, maybe enhancing performace a litte in the mean time. I definately do a fair amount of video editing on the server, so that would affect my decision at well. The video is generally ripped from a DVD then encoded to an MPEG-2. I view the video via a D Link Media Lounge set top box attached to my tv over a 10/100 LAN connection. Usually, I dont notice any choppy playback, but when there is a lot of on-camera motion I can notice some. I would guess that some of that has to do with the processing power of the D Link, but I just wanted to avoid any possible bottlenecks along the way.
unhappy_mage
[H]ard|DCer of the Month - October 2005
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Look at the network monitor on your current machine. If it's maxed out or periodically drops to zero, that might be an issue. Or it could be the limitations of the D-Link box. Try playing the files over network with another machine (borrow a laptop or something). See if it exhibits the same behavior as the set-top box.
If your disks are recent desktop drives and attached through either IDE or SATA, they will not have a problem to individually saturate a single 100 Mbit connection, provided that they are not heavily fragmented or accessed locally for some other operation that requires a lot of IO. This is only valid if there is sufficient CPU time left to service the IO requests and additionally there is sufficient system RAM.