Before everyone attacks, I’ve done lots of searching and read 3 - 4 relevant threads on the whole transfer speeds not being upto Gigabit standards.
I agree with some of the posters that fitting a Gigabit port when the device cannot even get close to half of this speed is not acceptable and I don’t understand why some of the members here take the condoscending approach of trying to inform posters that a Gigabit specification does not mean Gigabit speeds. Fitting a Gigabit port and shouting about it on your tech specs / packaging clealry infers you will get decent speed. Nobody is expecting true Gigabit or NAS speeds - but what we have is pathetic.
I use a MacBook Pro with every device connected directly to a Gigabit router with Cat6 cable. I get very fast speeds to my NAS and a very fast net connection to the router. So the router, NAS and MacBook all transfer files at speeds that warrant a Gigabit port.
The WD TV is super slow. I have the latest firmware. Cat6 direct to router etc etc.
So - what have people heard from WD on this? Is this a permanent hardware limitation (5400rpm drive and small cache) or is it something they are just taking their time to look at firmware wise.
I don’t want to be the ■■■■■■ who just bought a good (but not great) product just before they uprated the hardware / HD to deliver decent speeds.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3990/western-digital-wdtv-live-hub-review/4
One of the most attractive features of the Live Hub is the GbE port. When connected to an appropriate wired network, it should supposedly provide quite a bit of bandwidth. In fact, we spent quite a bit of time trying to get our NAS testbed to work with this device. Running NASPT and IOZone gave dismal bandwidth results. In NASPT, HD Video Playback at 1x, 2x and 4x consistenly delivered between 6.6 and 7 MB/s only. Transferring a 4 GB MKV file from the host computer to the Live Hub internal drive over the network was at a rate of around 10.6 MB/s. IOZone gave similar results, and never once did we cross 12 MB/s.
We contacted WD with our findings, and they got back to us indicating that the Live Hub is not a true NAS. Performance typical of NAS devices such as the My Book Live were not to be expected. They also indicated that the bandwidth characteristics of the Live Hub are sufficient for media playback / sharing. Usually NAS devices provide higher transfer rates for video streaming compared to file copying. However, in the case of the Live Hub, there is only one host CPU which handles both playback and transfer, resulting in even lesser bandwidth for video streaming. In this context, the GbE port ends up being only a minor performance booster.
Many thanks for this reply - the defnitive guide I’d say.
No separate controller for I/O, slow 5400rpm drive etc means the Gigabit port is present only as marketing noise, so they can legally say so on the spec = which is not cool at all from WD.
This won’t be fixed with firmware updates either as it’s clealry a hardware limitation.
not necessarily marketing noise, from a manufacturing point of view I wouldn’t be surprised if it was cheaper to provide a gigabit port than to provide a 100baseT port. For a box of this cost saving a few pennies is a big engineering high five…
Also, I guess the CPU in the SMP isn’t really capable of saturating a GbE-port. Except for the hardware-decoders, I’m sure it’s actually a relatively slow general purpose processor.
