WD velociraptors

silent · 23 Sep 2013 at 10:58

hi

i purchased 2 of these drives and haven't used them yet. tested them and all ok.

would they be good to use in my server as a video media streaming drive to quicken up any transcoding etc with ps3 media centre?

may sell the other one, is £70 inc for one that has warranty till 1st quarter 2015 a fair price?

Clav · 23 Sep 2013 at 11:44

I'm not familiar with PS3 transcoding, but if it is done on the fly from the server I imagine you will be limited more by the network connection? Even a basic HD should be quick enough to fully use a 100/1000mb connection.

silent · 23 Sep 2013 at 11:53

i'm using homeplugs, well, i was, moving house soon so i hope to instal cat 5 cabling everywhere to increase speeds. otherwise, back to homeplugs. its doing it on the fly now but syutters in playback, especially decoding the MKV files.

cokecan · 23 Sep 2013 at 12:26

Transcoding is quite a CPU intensive task so chances are if it's not the network that's bottlenecking then the CPU isn't quick enough to transcode on the fly. Faster disks will make very little difference (if any)

wonko · 23 Sep 2013 at 12:28

Clav said:
I'm not familiar with PS3 transcoding, but if it is done on the fly from the server I imagine you will be limited more by the network connection? Even a basic HD should be quick enough to fully use a 100/1000mb connection.

Same here really - I don't know about transcoding for the PS/3 either, but generally it's cpu intensive, so I'd agree with Clav that the speed of the hard disk itself is unlikely to be the limiting factor (unless of course it's being accessed for other things at the same time). I just did a 'back of envelope' calc (for my own benefit really) - if you had for example a 50GB file to transcode down to 5GB in, say, 60 minutes then hard disk throughput would only be about 15MB/sec.

So I'd try to work out what the bottleneck is first. What's your server, and can you monitor CPU load, disk and network throughput while transcoding to see what the limiting factor is? The homeplugs could well be a factor so could you temporarily bypass them as a test? It's also possible that the PS3 is the cause of the stuttering if it doesn't 'like' the format of the video.

silent · 23 Sep 2013 at 12:49

i think the ps3 is some of the blame, it drops the connection all the time, but i think the homeplugs don't help although they work well with my amp - denon av2313.

my 'server' is my main pc in my sig. has 5 hard drives in there and a ssd for windows and programmes.

wonko · 23 Sep 2013 at 13:25

OK, so I'd first suggest going into task manager and looking at cpu utilisation while transcoding. If all cores are at/near 100% then you could try less processor-intensive settings in whatever software you're using to do the transcoding. If you also look at the networking tab in task manager you should see a steady throughput of data - interruptions that coincide with the stuttering may point to a networking problem.
I don't think that your homeplugs working with your av amp really proves much - if you're streaming audio to it then the data rate would be a lot lower than for video, and any problems could be masked by buffering.
Another approach would be transcoding a file off-line but using the same settings as you use for 'on the fly'. If that plays without stuttering then it suggests that it's the 'on the fly' aspect of the transcoding that's the problem and not the streaming/playback.
Hope this isn't stating the obvious! Let us know how you get on.

silent · 24 Sep 2013 at 12:21

i am going to do this when i get the beast back out of storage. i will also have a slightly different setup when i move too. i may have a custom built small pc in the lounge with a 480 bigfoot SSD drive in just for movies and music. it could help alleviate the homeplug problem, but need to find the right house first.

thanks for your help.