Wireless External HDD to stream blu-ray and music? Possible?

I intend to build up a library of my own blu-rays ripped onto an external (probably around 2TB) along with all my music and other data.

My question is can I stream the data wirelessly to my laptop. Ideally I would like to be able to stream the blu-ray movies to the laptop anywhere in the house without having to plug the thing physically into the laptop. Would wireless G (my current wireless card) cut it or would I need to bump up to a N capable card?

Or am I on the wrong track altogether??

 

you should be able to do it with G if there is little else on the network wireless. our entire collection is on a NAS unit attached to our router. and we stream to both N and G devices ( dual band router )

if you can do it look into a basic NAS adaptor that an external hard drive can hook to or if you need alot of space a dedicated NAS that supports JBOB, we currently run 3 x 2T in ours. trying to run wreles both directions would cut your usable speed in under half

 

Nothing else would run on the network while watching a movie. Also currently I believe 2TB would be enough for my uses. If I need more then I guess I can just upgrade to a larger capacity drive.

This "NAS adaptor" how does it work. Is it a kind of wireless transmitter that connects via usb/ethernet port on HDD? Perhaps a link to a common NAS transmitter would be very useful as I know nothing about this.

Cheers

 

Nas adaptor is short for Network Attached Storage, it has USB ports on one end to hook drives to and an network end to hook into your switch or router. then your entire network can access it. tink of it as a minature file server.

if you NEED to run a NAS wireless you can use a wireless bridge but that is alot more work and cuts your speed in half. 50% for sending video, 50% for recieving it. so I dont reccomend wireless but wired for the sending side.

 

I assume you mean sending side as in sending data to the external drive. I don't mind the speed being cut as I wouldn't watch a movie and send data to the drive simultaneously. So should be fine?

 

no I mean when the external drive or nas is streaming or copying the file to your laptop or device.

NAS> cable > Router > Wireless connection > laptop(s)

when your moving large amounts of data you do NOT want both devices to be attached wireless or you WILL see your data transfer rate be cut by 50-60% have your storeage unit hard cabled to the network and allow the network to send it to one or multiple devices.

 

Ah ok. Seems complicated but I am sure I can work it out

Upgrading to a Wirelss N router with a wireless N card would that see me stutter free even if the data rate is cut 60-50%?

 

depends on how well you have them encoded, stream to one unit ... possible, to 2 units nope

 

yeah just one unit. just ripping them straight to iso. Exact copy of original blu ray.

So which particular hardware do you recommend on the NAS front. Any links to particular products I can get my eyes on?

Grateful for the insight you are giving me on this topic. You are due rep

 

if your going straight to ISO ... your going to NEED hard cable at the storage point. thats about 30+ GB to stream as where if you did a tight .MKV its less ( 4-9 ) you can push a stream much better and trade the network traffic for CPU cycles in your laptop

 

ok that is good to know. I will therefore hardwire the HDD to the router and get myself a wireless N capable card in due course.

Do you happen to know which card has the highest data throughput? Along with best Wirelss N router/modem. Currently have modem and separate wireless G apple box lol. I know old fashioned!

So basically I am going to need new

Wireless Router N
Wireless N card
NAS adaptor
external storage (2TB)

anything else?

 

pretty much any of them are similar, it depends more on your router. in our household we have everything from atheros, Apple, Broadcom, Intel. for stability I tend to prefer the Intel cards though.

 

Ok! In that case probably go for the Intel 5300. What router do you recommend?

 

anything I can run DD-WRT firmware on . I tend to like ASUS RT-N12 and RT-N16's had good luck with Linksys and D-Link as well but read reviews on them as asome models are flakey

 

In your place, i'd go for an intel 6200 or 6300. If the adapter you replace is a full height, you'll have to order a bracket on ebay to make the 6200/6300 a full height. Your antenna wires need to be long enough as well.

 

Qnap Qnap Qnap

 

lol, agreed or a drobo

 

I've got a 2TB RAID1 setup on my TS-219P+ and with GigE (wired) I'm seeing reads of 85MB/s and writes of 40MB/s. Over 802.11n 300Mbps wireless I'm getting 10MB/s both ways when the router is connected directly to the NAS.

I'm not entirely sure what the bitrate is for BluRay, but last I checked WMV tops out at 20Mbps for 1080.

 

BD raw iso is about 60, .mkv about 30

 

I'm looking at a Linksys E4200 router and a Seagate GoFlex 2TB NAS with Gigabit interface(cheap). Not using a USB, gives any LAN based connections the best throughput to the 2TB HDD. Unless you can get a LAN based USB 3.0
The WiFi would be the limiting factor unless all your WiFi is 450Mb.

 

You could also use a Pogoplug, which is a device that attaches to your router and turns any USB storage device into a NAS. You can access it through a web browser or client software that puts the drive in Windows Explorer, making it appear just like a drive connected directly to your computer.

 

An interesting concept. But too expensive and not suitable for streaming HD content from and external drive.

 

Good to know.

Maybe it is just me, but the QNAP seems far better. Might want to check reviews for the Seagate because typically cheap NAS's get cheap throughput. This review pegs it at 16MB/s over GigE, which is pathetic compared to what a QNAP can do.

Also my biggest beef with something like that is you're locked down to a 1(?)-year warranty on the hard drive and your locked into whatever Seagate decides you can have.

My QNAP is topping out at 80+MB/s on GigE direct connection to my desktop, but hits only 10MB/s over an E4200 (300Mbps connection to the desktop/router, GigE connection between QNAP/router). If Windows is checking the copy for success (likely) than my effective rate would be somewhere around 20MB/s but I am not sure of this at all. So yeah you're definitely going to want to move to 802.11n and from the looks of it the E4200 should be enough for what you need. 300Mbps should be okay so don't stress if you can't get a receiver that works at 450Mbps.

 

The seagate information is good to know. It seems to be the software that lets the unit down. Wonder what disks they put in those units?

I was looking at Synology as a NAS solution. It's a lot more polished, but you do pay for that refinement.

Synology have published benchmarks which give a feel for the throughput of each device.

The 1Bay DS110+ gives a Windows upload/download of 60/103 MBytes/sec over Gigabit Ethernet.

Yerp, QNAP is in the same ball park as Synology and just requires a bit of research on what one is really after.

Was just thinking about Seagate as a starter for 1 point, before I paided out the big money for a 'real' solution. But it sounds like money saved and spent on QNAP is a better idea.

At least I've ruled out the Iomega iConnect Wireless Data Station, unless one has a death wish.

Probably have a play with the USB on the E4200(shopping today ) first and get a feel for the technology and do a bit more reading.

Woke up and thought 'NAS'. That was only a few days ago.
And a day or so before that, I woke up and thought 'Router'.
Damn this old men dream dreams stuff. Be better if I just had visions like young men.

Narrowed the routers down to Linksys E4200, Netgear WNDR4000, WNDR3800(not on sale yet)

 

Depends on how you encode. The BD raw ISO may be 60, but the main movie m2ts file of TRON: Legacy here is only 30GB (40GB total ISO size), and transcoded via Handbrake and the High Quality preset it's crunched down to 6.5GB. You could even loosen things up a bit and still hit 10GB easy for a bit more quality.

If you don't need identical quality to the source, you can transcode a 1080p Blu-Ray movie down to 6-10GB on average and still have 95% or more of the source quality. If you're ok with 720p (which I do for things like dramas that don't need the ability to count nose hairs), that's even smaller at 3-5GB.