Network Drive for Sage

[kltye]

Hi all,

I have a little Shuttle case for my HTPC, so I decided to use an old (Dell Dimension) PIII 1GHz machine to run some more storage on my network for Sage to use. I bought a 300GB PATA drive for the Dell and hooked it up as a secondary master.

Now, the problem starts when I start watching live HDTV. It stutters terribly since Sage is writing the file to the network drive. Looking at task manager, the network utilization is only 22% (out of 100Mbps). I've confirmed that this isn't enough, since SDTV simultaneous recording and playback requires around 16-20% of the 100Mbps.

I did some benchmarking on the drive, and it can manage ~50MB/s so the IDE controller isn't the limitation. A one-way LAN file transfer utilizes ~50% of the network, while a 2-way transfer (both send and receive) uses ~80%. (Thanks to full-duplex)

My question is, what's going on? It seems that Sage's streaming video is causing problems with my network. I've tried two different NICs with the Dell, but the results are the same. My Shuttle can saturate a 100Mbps link using a one-way file transfer.

Any help/ideas would be greatly appreciated!