Zyxel NSA310 Nas Drive and SB Touch

[reg66]

great stuff, many thanks (and for letting me know there's improvment to audio!).
one more thing... i am a bit dissapointed with the speed of SBT reading HDD, hence the reason for the NAS. i only want this NAS drive (zyxel nsa310) with LMS to take the strain off of the SBT cpu.
will i notice a significant speed increase for accessing hdd data (NAS will soley be used for LMS/music)?

i know it's only a £35 NAS enclosure, but i haven't pools of cash and don't wanna spend out only to be gutted by the lack of speed increase.

cheers again

[vinodt1347]

Hi Reg66,

I dont think you read the posts fully. What I said is that I did not see any significant difference between using SBT with a wired, wireless or direct wired connection to the nsa310.
Regarding your latest question - I think the £35 deal probably will not give you the squeezebox server. That package itself is about 1GB in size. That needs to be downloaded via the internet when you are installing/configuring the nsa310. Iam sure that you will need both the internet as well as a hard disk attached to the nsa310. It is worth the while around £120. You get a 2TB hard disk for this. Iam not sure how you were planning to access your music files if there is no HDD in the nsa310?

[reg66]

hi vinodt, sorry for the confusion, the exclamation mark at the end of the bracketed sentence meant i was being sarcastic. i see that most people agree there's no difference, also did some more searching and found that it's purely data transfered, so cannot be any different. if you transfer a .avi or .jpg etc from one pc to another, it's not going to be any better quality because the connection was wired. thanks for clarifying though.

also, sorry i didn't mention, i have several hdd's kicking around, fully appreciate the need to install one and hold all flacs. so just need the NAS bay.

but, it seems i overlooked a big thing, if i connect NAS->SBT->hifi via ethernet as a stand alone player, i won't be able to use my phone as remote over wifi. i want to be able to see what i'm searching for on the remote (if i'm too far to see SBT screen) and the logitech one with screen is too expensive.

looks like me hopes for a stand alone player (with phone as remote) are fading.

anyway, if i connect the NAS to router (with squeezebox server installed), is there a signifcant difference to speed instead of SBT just reading usb hdd?
thanks again for all help

[aubuti]

anyway, if i connect the NAS to router (with squeezebox server installed), is there a signifcant difference to speed instead of SBT just reading usb hdd?

That really depends on the specs of the NAS, and I'm not familiar with the model you have. What is the CPU, and how much RAM? A decently spec'd NAS will be much faster than running SBT's built-in server and a USB drive.

Also note that the speed of the server usually only matters for two things: scanning the library and menu interface. For scanning, you don't have to do it very often, and if you have a huge library you can always do it sometime when you're not listening to the SBT -- just start it scanning and walk away.

For the menu interface, the slowness of some NASs is only an issue with the LMS web interface, which takes a surprising amount of computing oomph to run. Using a smartphone app like iPeng or one of the Android offerings shouldn't have that problem. (Also note that the LMS web interface isn't even available when running the SBT's built-in server, because it requires more than the SBT hardware can reliably deliver.)

In other words, both the NAS approach and the SBT+USB drive approach are fast enough to stream music :-)

[reg66]

sorry for not making clear, this thread is about ZyXEL NSA310, that's the NAS i was enquiring about speed.

i have SBT connected to hdd via usb. the UI is quite slow. i would like to know if there's a significant increase in UI speed when connected to ZyXEL NSA310 (1.2ghz, 256mb) with LMS/squeezeserver installed. if there's not much difference in speed, then i won't bother spending out on this quite cheap NAS enclosure (i don't have a lot of cash at the moment!). if there is marked speed improvement, then i will invest.

thanks

oh, and the NAS will only be utilizing LMS, so cpu won't be bogged down with other functioning.

[aubuti]

sorry for not making clear, this thread is about ZyXEL NSA310, that's the NAS i was enquiring about speed.

i have SBT connected to hdd via usb. the UI is quite slow. i would like to know if there's a significant increase in UI speed when connected to ZyXEL NSA310 (1.2ghz, 256mb) with LMS/squeezeserver installed. if there's not much difference in speed, then i won't bother spending out on this quite cheap NAS enclosure (i don't have a lot of cash at the moment!). if there is marked speed improvement, then i will invest.

Yes, I understood from the thread title and your earlier post what model NAS you are using, but that doesn't make me familiar with it. And I still don't know what kind of 1.2GHz CPU (ARM? Intel? PPC?), but the RAM is sufficient (barely) for running LMS and the CPU is probably okay.

I expect the UI will be faster with the NAS than with the Touch's built-in LMS. Whether or not it's "significant" or "marked" really depends on how you measure it. It will almost certainly be more reliable than the Touch's built-in LMS, which works great for some people, and not at all for others.

Finally

[reg66]

many thanks, cpu is 1.2GHz Marvell Kirkwood, but i was ideally asking for owners of ZyXEL NSA310 with direct experience regarding speed. no offense, and thanks again for taking time to give input.

[aubuti]

many thanks, cpu is 1.2GHz Marvell Kirkwood, but i was ideally asking for owners of ZyXEL NSA310 with direct experience regarding speed. no offense, and thanks again for taking time to give input.

No problem at all -- there is no substitute for direct experience, even though the comparison also depends on the particular USB drive you are using at present, the size of your library, the quality of your home network, and several other variables. At least having the same NAS model takes away one source of variation.

[vinodt1347]

reg66,

Iam using the SBT with nsa310 connected through ethernet. I have 1000+ titles and no issues. Also use a lot of internet radio. I use the remote that came with the SBT or my laptop to control the SBT or go over physically.
I dont use the phone remote till now. But if they are all on the same network should be fine.

[reg66]

cheers