I have the WDTVLive SMP and a Drobo 5n, so I thought I’d share my experience so far:
Note: the Drobo5N is a brilliant NAS device in every regard…the only issue is with the WDTVLIVE SMP.
First off, I used to have a DroboS, 16TB volume connected to my Win7 PC, and would share the movie folder out and stream on the SMP. Besides the occassional lost share connection issue, and the fact that the PC would have to be on all the time, it streamed perfectly with never an issue, even with the largest .mkv files.
I recently sold my DroboS and bought a Drobo 5N, and even installed a 64GB mSata drive, which is supposed to boost read performance. I set up 4 shares, in a 16TB Volume.
I reset my SMP to factory and started to set it up from scratch, updated the firmware to 1.13.18 and it found the DroboN shares right away under ‘windows shares’.
My media showed up immediately. Very happy…until…
My movies and videos stutter, and pause/catch up spoadically now, and it’s extremely annoying and disappointing.
I’ve disabled Media Content in case it was that. I’ve tried .mkv’s, ISO dvd’s, mpg’s and avi’s, and they all are prone to stuttering. This is the exact media that used to play fine.
If copied to USB drive and direct connected to the SMP, it’s perfect.
When I read/write to my Drobo5N, the performance never is less than 36MB /per second, and is often 75MB /second. The 100Mbps wired port on the SMP is slower than the rate that the Drobo can dish it out, so I don’t think that’s the issue. The Drobo HDD light barely blinks, definitely no sign of distress.
I cannot tell you how disappointed I am, since I got rid of the DroboS, and now am left with a NAS with all my years of media, that doesn’t play well.
I also tried reverting fw back to 1.12.xx but it didn’t help.
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Networking info:
Cisco E4200 dual band router fw 1.04 (updating to 1.05 today)
DROBO is setup as a DHCP reservation
Drobo is connected to a Cisco SMB300 Professional Gb switch. (I’ve also tried Drobo direct to router)
SMP is connected direct to Router. (for some reason, it was worse when connected through switch)
Router MTU is set to Auto
Drobo has 5 Seagate Barracuda 3TB drives (7200rpm) set for dual disk redundancy.
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If anyone has any ideas on this, I’d appreciate it.
I’d hold off on the Drobo5N until the issue is resolved. I don’t believe it’s the Drobo’s fault, but perhaps the way the SMP is requesting packets from the Drobo is causing too much network exhaustion. Dunno.
