Which is the bottleneck

General Discussions
1

Hey Guys,

My setup has a pretty powerful CPU and dedicated GPU, when streaming 5+ streams its basically all direct play or audio transcodes which puts little strain on the server at best 20%

However!!!

I have my hard drives connected through USB3.0 seagate externals… My thinking is now the bottleneck is going to be the USB transfer speeds of 30MBps, when Im sending 15MBps as original quality shows etc…

Would it be better to connect a NAS or connect my USB 3.0 externals to my router directly?

Am I mixing up Mbps vs mbps? when I transfter to the drives I think its Mbps, and if Im streaming 5 streams at 10Mbps thats exceeding the USB 3.0 transfer rate???

anyways someone please clairify this so I can sleep at night, wlese Ill have to buy a whole new rig to accomodate the internal HDD;s… :frowning:

NOTE: not having complaints on the client side yet, I just started top think of this when I had 5 people playing around 10Mbps as my upload is 800Mbps so I dont need to worry about that, but now I may need to worry about the USB 3.0 speeds…

2

USB storage, 2, 3 or otherwise, is not recommended for streaming media from, especially if you have multiple users accessing your server simultaneously.

There are many technical reasons, but the main one is that USB can only stream data in serial (Universal Serial Bus), so that headline bandwidth figure you see is for a single stream of data. You can’t parallelise multiple file read and writes over USB. This makes USB storage great for backups, where you’re sending files one at a time to the disk, but rubbish for multiple process/multiple user situations.

Moving the USB disk(s) to your router won’t make any difference. IMHO, you’d be better off getting a NAS enclosure, taking the disks out of your USB caddies and sticking them in the NAS.

3

Thanks!

the Nas I guess would be directly network connected and the drives PCIE connected inside… If I do get a NAS would it alleviate the transfer bottleneck then?

VS connecting USB 3 to the router… still going through the USB… crap

4

Yeah, with a NAS your (SATA, at a guess) discs will have their parent interface on a PCIe bus. Much faster, lower CPU overhead and parallel disk access :+1:t2:

Win all around (except it’ll cost more, obvs :man_shrugging:t2:)

5

Yes LOL I already have put more then wanted into this. I think what Ill do is do some testing on how many concurrent transcoded streams on 1 drive I can handle without issue… if its 10-15 then I wont care, but if its 7 or so, then Im already hitting that

6

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