WNDR3700 + 1.5TB External HDD Question

Hi everyone,

I'm buying the following devices this weekend:

1. 1.5TB Western Digital External HDD
2. Netgear WNDR3700
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The router is preloaded with ReadyDLNA and obviously UPnP, so when I plugin the HDD through the router's USB port, it automatically loads videos and pictures to my Playstation 3 (PS3). And I'm able to watch many types of video and music formats. =)
That is all understood, and I'm comfortable with that.


However my question lies in the external hard drive I'm buying. It runs at 5400rpm. I understand that there exists 7200pm in the world, but I want to know what difference will this 5400rpm HDD do for what I plan to use it for?

How will it affect anything? Will it stream music and movies slowly to the PS3? Will it degrade quality? I want to be sure to provide the best thing possible for my family, lol.

Thanks in advance for the answers!

 

The difference between 5400 rpm and 7200 rpm hard drives lies in the latency and burst read rates. The sustained read rates between both will be about 5% different. You can safely go for the 5400 rpm.

 

It won't affect anything- average read/write speed of 5400rpm HDs is above 60MB/s which is way faster than you can hope to transfer via USB 2.0 port- especially one in a router.

 

Essentially, what downloads said. The NAS functionality in the WNDR3700 isn't particular fast. Expect ~10MB/s read/write speed. That ain't bad for an NAS that's integrated in a router. Nevertheless, the speed of the hard drive is obv irrelevant here as the WNDR is the limiting factor. If you need more speed, you'd require a dedicated NAS.

 

Downloads is right. The USB on the Netgear is way too slow for you to notice any difference.

 

Oh, I see. Thank you very much for your answers =)


1.)Is it possible to get a dedicated NAS that can transcode certain x264 formats like .mkv?

2.) Can dedicated NAS be connected to the PS3?

 

1.) afaik, the answer is no.

2.) yes, the ps3 can access a NAS over your home network.

 

1) definitely yes. Just pick a right one.

I've had my HP ex475 NAS for couple years now and it streams .mkv to my multimediaboxthingy* connected to TV. Only thing needed to do was renaming mkv to avi so the actual media server software started sharing those files.

*given to me by my operator, can't remember type

 

bought a new WNDR3700 to go with my new Mac Powerbook. Hooked everything up, including a new 1.5TB My Book Essential Mac formatted Hard Drive. I also have a Maxtor 1T OneTouch - 4 Drive that I could see in my readyshare folder. This was formatted for PC, but I reformatted for Mac when I bought the Powerbook. I could see the Drive in my Readyshare, even copy files from it. But I couldn't write to it. I figured I did something wrong, but didn't want to lose any data - unfortunately I lost my Payroll software that I just bought, or spend a day writing to discs. So I bought a 1.5 TB My Book Essential. I reformatted for Mac, can read and write to it when plugged directly in to the Mac. But when I use the WNDR3700, I can only read from it. When transferring data I first get this error "One or more items can’t be copied to “T_Drive” because you don’t have permission to read them. Do you want to copy the items you are allowed to read?" When I click continue, I get this error..."The operation can’t be completed because you don’t have permission to access some of the items." I believe I have full read write permissions as the administrator. Tech support says you can't hook up ANY external harddrive, the usb is for flash drives only.

 

Honestly I don't know a thing about Macs- all I found out is that current file system is HFS or HFS+.
According to WNDR3700 specs it supports FAT16/32, NTFS Read/Write, Ext 2 Read/Write, Ext 3 Read/Write- meaning Windows and Linux file systems. Reformat to NTFS and connect it again.