External drive with Ethernet?

sWiZzLe · 8 Aug 2007 at 10:16

Been looking at the USB external drives as they're getting pretty cheap now. But i could really do with is one with an ethernet connection. Surely these are a lot quicker for backing up. I also have a KiSS DVD player with an ethernet connection - if i got one of these drives would i be able to connect it direct or would i need a hub?

Can anyone recommend a cheap external drive with ethernet connection please?

Cheers

rpstewart · 8 Aug 2007 at 10:29

Ethernet connected drives are usually a fair bit slower than USB. THe vast majority use 100Mbit ethernet which has a theoretical maximum of 12.5Mb/s but will normally be 9-10Mb/s. A decent USB drive will do 35-40Mb/s.

There are a few gigabit ones out there but they're not cheap and I very much doubt your DVD supports gigabit.

HEADRAT · 8 Aug 2007 at 10:45

Also a single external drive would never saturate a gige connection.

HEADRAT

sWiZzLe · 8 Aug 2007 at 11:43

Does the slow transfer speed over ethernet have anything to do with the drive being formatted as FAT32? Been look around and i'm somewhat confused about why the transfer rate would be so slow via 100Mbit.

If i formatted the drive to NTFS would that help?
No my drive doesnt support gigabit, would it be unable to stream avi's then?

rpstewart · 8 Aug 2007 at 12:01

100Mbit is 100 million BITS per second. Divide that by 8 to get bytes and then by 10^6 to get Megabytes and you end up with a 12.5Mb/s theoretical maximum. On top of that you've got to take into account packet overheads and general inneficiencies in the protocol which eat into that 12.5Mb/s

malcolm · 8 Aug 2007 at 23:38

sWiZzLe said:
I also have a KiSS DVD player with an ethernet connection - if i got one of these drives would i be able to connect it direct or would i need a hub?

To use the network connection on the Kiss player you have to run a server application from a PC to steam the music/video file to the player, so yes you will need a hub as well as a PC. The file could be on an external drive, either USB or lan, but that is really just any drive that the PC can access.

If your Kiss has an internal HD you may be able to use ftp to store files on it's HD, but that usually needs modified firmware.

I have recently bought a LAN HD case, it is rather slow to read/write and tends to fall over at regular intervals, good job it wasn't expensive!