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[nmcar]

Hi all! I recently purchased a DNS-320 and filled it with two Seagate Barracuda ST320005N4A 2TB hard drives. I set 500GB in RAID1 (volume 1) and the rest as JBOD (volume 2).

The DNS-320 is connected to a Belkin DB750N router via cat5e cable to the router's gigabit port. Although the router is dual band, both my laptop and WDTV Live only connect to the 2.4Ghz band.

Until I purchased the DNS-320, I streamed movies from a WD My Book 1TB external drive connected to the same router via USB port and had no problems.

I turns out that almost every movie (again, 720p) that I stream from the DNS-320 freezes from time to time. When I stream to my laptop, it freezes for about 4 seconds every 4 or 5 minutes (the LH drive led stops blinking). But when I stream to the WDTV, it freezes and stops playing.

I have read in the forum that certain drives (advanced format, por instance) have issues when set in a RAID array. I don't know whether these drives are such drives and whether that is the problem.

I learnt here that RAID only provides redundancy and that it is not a replacement of a backup. However, I would like to have a small portion of the drive in RAID1, if possible. However, if you believe that these drives will not work properly in RAID1, I can re-format the drives in JBOD.

I mainly bought the NAS to stream movies and other media from a drive that is on 24/7, so this is really dissapointing.

Any comments will be welcome. I appreciate your collaboration. I am learning a lot in this forum.

[nmcar]

P.S.:  I checked with the NAS web interface which drives I had installed and it reports that they are Seagate Model No. ST2000DL003-9VT1.

Moreover, I also wanted to clarify that I did not updated to the last firmware and I am currently running v 2.0.

Again, any comments are welcome and I am willing to provide further information, if needed.

Thank you.

[cable2]

Hi,
Sorry no answers, but a question.  Are you using the UPNP server or network shares to stream your videos?  You might give both to see if that effects your performance any.  The only problem I can forsee is that with 2.0 firmware, your media server will only dish up non-alphanumeric files, this was fixed in 2.02.  I would do a little research to see if the 2.02 firmware would be problematic for you.  By the way, I have used all of the WD TV live series and had trouble with using any wireless adapter on the LIVE and LIVE Plus anyway.  The newest version "LIVE STREAMING MEDIA PLAYER" the builtin wireless worked ok except for everytime my microwave turned on everything froze.  I tried powerline too, but finally settled on a MOCA device to do most of my home networking for media anyway.  These MOCA things are the most stable devices and can handle HD streams.   Good luck

[nmcar]

Thank you Cable2 for your kind reply.

I use network shares when I stream to the WDTV. I own the new WDTV Streaming Media Player with built-in wireless n. When I stream to the laptop, I choose to play the file with VLC player.

I have not used UPnP for streaming video yet (only music, and it works ok). I will give it a try. The only downside that I see of UPnP server is that it takes too long for the NAS to add a folder when there are several files into it. I have almost 200 movies in a folder and, AFAIK, you have to refresh the folder from the UPnP tab every time you add files to the folder so it is available for streaming. Unless I'm doing something wrong, that's what I have been doing.

I received the DNS-320 a few days ago and I am a linux noobie, so I am currently reading a lot in this forum. I thought there were issues with FW 2.02 and that's why I have not upgraded. I will do my job with that and I will post my experience.

A last question: so you think this issue has nothing to do with the barracuda hdd's? I could not find so far other people who has successfuly installed them with a similar configuration in a DNS-320.

Thank you.

[cable2]

Hi again,
Regarding your hard drives, you can never rule anything out but, I doubt that the hard drives have anything to do with your intermittent freezing problem.  My first guess would be wireless issues, do you have a lot of wireless neighbors?  You can use NetStumbler or even windows to tell how many wireless signals are nearby.  What kind of signal strength are you getting with the WD unit?  If there are some close by, you might try playing with the transmission channel on your router, most brands have some way to pick a channel manually.  If you have a long enough ethernet cable you could temporarily make a direct connection.  That will tell you for sure if it's wireless or the 320.
There have been problems / complaints regarding the UPNP refresh deal with both the 2.0 and 2.02.  If you check the services and applications you are running on your unit, you can search those things and then see if there is some serious problem with 2.02, otherwise, I would recommend upgrading.   The refresh issue. by the way is intermittent, right now mine have been working fine and updating almost immediately and I have 3+TB of videos.   Well, you have a few things to try.  Good luck

[nmcar]

Thank you cable2. I will test your suggestions this weekend and then I will post. Good-bye.

[nmcar]

UPDATE 03-14-2012
I want to share with you all how my problem-solving routine continued, so others may benefit from my (little) experience. I followed Cable2's suggestions and also read all the posts related to this issue and, as a first attempt, I created a user with read/write permissions to access my shares. I further enabled NFS. Before this, I had not set any users. Believe it or not, I could stream the same movie that previously froze to my WDTV over wireless without a glitch. I cannot understand what is the difference of creating users with respect to performance, but it also made browsing my share's folders from my laptop faster than before (I had to map them again).
Despite having enabled NFS, I accessed to Windows shares from my WDTV. When I accessed through Linux shares, I could not see all folders.
The only problem that I had is that I could not reconnect to the shares after having accessed through the media server. WDTV showed a sign stating that it could not connect. But then, sometimes, it would  connect anyway. I don't know whether this is a bug in WDTV's firmware (it has many).
I also tested enabling the UPnP server. For my test, I only included one movie inside (the same which froze some days ago) and played OK from my WDTV.
Honestly, I prefer watching movies from my shares. It is not necessary to refresh the folder in order to see new-added files.
Another issue I experienced during this process is that I had trouble to stream to the WDTV with a second user I created. It had the same privileges than the one that worked. I wanted to have a user called WDTV with read-only privileges, but then I learnt that WDTV writes info on the NAS and so, it does not connect if it can't write. However, after having allowed right privileges to that user, I could not connect ot WDTV neither.
Well, I don't want to bother you and thank you for your help. I still have other troubles (e.g. for accesing DNS-320 from the internet) but I will ask help in a separate post.

[nmcar]

After further testing, I can state:

- while streaming 720p movies from network shares I experience intermittent pauses and, in some cases, the movie even stops playing. This happens mainlywhen I stream to my WDTV, but also happened when I streamed videos to my laptop using VLC.
- I also experience these cuts while displaying pictures from network shares.
- When I stream the same movie from media server, it plays fine, without pauses. However, it does not pick up subtitles! Moreover, when browsing my movies folder, movies appear in non-alphabetical order, which forces me to browse the entire collection in order to find the movie I want.

If the same movie does not freeze while playing from media server, I guess it is not a problem of lack of speed of my router (a Belkin N750 DB, wireless n).

Also, I cannot understand why I can stream movies without problems from network shares when I connect my WD My Book external drive to my router's USB port. Instead of selecting the DNS-320, I choose the router. And all movies play fine. Why the DNS-320, which is connected to the same router via gigabit LAN, has this faulty performace? Is it an issue of incompatibility with the WDTV? I always use Windows shares.

I also installed fun_plug to try mediatomb, which would not have problems in picking up subtitles. However, I could not finish the installation yet.

I am running firmware 2.0 yet, since I read that it has more flaws than advantages and that it is not possible to go back to previous firmware. Does 2.02 fw solve the subtitles problem in media server? If it does, I could try upgrading.

What else can I try?

Thank you.

[nmcar]

Hi all.  For those of you who experience troubles for streaming video from network shares of a drive in the DNS-320 NAS to a WDTV Streaming media player, I tell you that I have followed an advice from the guys at the WD forum and made a reset to factory settings of my WDTV and.... zas!  It plays fine now.
At least, it works fine so far..... I will report if I have any trouble again.

[nmcar]

Hi everybody. I guess I was too optimistic when I believed I had solved the problem by resetting the WDTV. It turned out that I continued experiencing intermitent freezes while streaming from network shares of the DNS-320.

So, I kept thinking why this happens only when I stream from the DNS-320 and not from the WD My Book external drive connected via USB to the router.

Then I thought it could be because the included utp cable is Cat. 5 which, out of the research I made, it seems that it cannot handle speeds of more than 100Mbps, while USB 2.0 can transfer up to 480 Mbps. So I gave it a try and purchased a Cat. 6 utp cable to hook the DNS-320 to the router. But unfortunately, the interruptions are still happening.

I checked the network speed in the DNS-320 and it was set to Auto 100-1000 Mbps. So I changed it to 1000. While my router (Belkin N750 DB) has gigabit ports, I cannot find an option to configure the network speed.

The last idea I have is to connect the router and the WDTV by cable (Cat. 6). But I still can't understand why this happens only with the DNS-320, since I can stream the same movies by wi-fi to the WDTV when I use the external drive connected via USB to the router. So, it is not interference from other devices/neighbor wireless networks.

Can anybody guess where the problem is?  Do you believe this could be solved by wiring the router to the WDTV?

Thank you.

[JavaLawyer]

Wire the WDTV directly to your router. Streaming video over 2.4 Ghz is known to be problematic at high resolutions. There's a good chance you are experiencing buffer under-runs because the 2.4 Ghz data pipe is too narrow to keep up. This is especially true if you don't have a pristine line-of-site connection in close proximity to the router and minimal competing wireless traffic/interference.

Since your WDTV is wireless, the Belkin router's wired connectivity (i.e. GB) speed doesn't factor into the equation since the wireless connection is the bottleneck and can only tap a small fraction of the DNS-320's available throughput.

If you are intent on sticking with wireless, make sure you are connected at Wireless N.  If you have wireless devices connected to your 2.4 Ghz band that are G or B, your network will throttle down to the lower wireless speed. If you set the wireless band as "N only" then you can eliminate this as a possible issue. Maintaining the wireless N only setting will also reduce router overhead. You can also validate the actual connection type through your router web interface.

That said, I strongly recommend using a wired connection if you are primarily using your WDTV to stream HD video. Data buffering issues (video/audio stuttering/freezing and pixelation artifacts) are very common with wireless connections.

One more thing to consider. Make sure no other devices are accessing your DNS-320 during the video stream (e.g. backup job, other users/services pulling/pushing data, etc).

[nmcar]

Thank JavaLawyer you for your prompt reply. I will try wiring the WDTV to the router.

But I would like to understand why I can stream over the wireless network (n) when I plug my external WD My Book drive to the router via USB. It the same router that streams the movies to the WDTV (which is also wireless N) and the movies play fine.

I was aware that I had to disable other applications (P2P, FTP server, and others not needed) in order to release the DNS-320 processor and memory. Moreover, there were no b or g wireless devices connected to the router while I experienced the streaming issues. The only wireless device was the WDTV and it is situated in direct line of sight to the router, less than 2 meters away.

So I was wondering whether it was due to an issue with Samba, between WDTV and DNS-320?

[JavaLawyer]

The first thing you should do is test the WDTV via a wired connection, as this will eliminate "wireless" as the issue if the video is still choppy/freezing.

[nmcar]

Update 03-29-2012: I wired my WDTV to the router using a Cat. 6 cable and streamed different movies. So far, the played fine, without freezes. Moreover, the movies started playing in less time and, for instance, photos played in slideshow fluently, without pauses. I even let the P2P application running when I streamed the movies and they played fine.

Since wiring these devices is not a problem for me (although it'll take some extra work to arrange cables and so on, so my wife does not protest), I will leave it wired.

But I still have curiosity to know what happened here, since my WD My Book external drive could stream the movies without problems.

Thank you for your valuable advices and case closed.