RE: SHS2007 Video 3 - Brilliant Living

["Phil Harris" <phil@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I like the suggestion to go to fibre drives if we need "more
than 6
> video
> streams" - ok, thats the 3 bedrooms, kitchen, lounge, den... nope
> that's me
> done. Do I have a fibre drive array to stream to the dining room, or
> have
> less kids?
> I looked at a fibre array for a client once (i must admit it was a few
> years
> back) and they were insanely expensive.
>
> just my 2p worth.
> Jim

Of course that's *SIMULTANEOUS* streams, not total numbers of streams ...
if
you know that you'll never have more than (say) three streams running at
any
one time then it's not an issue how many possible player locations you
have.

Sounds a bit like impressive sounding sales-speak to me - fibre drives
would
only speed up the burst transfer rate between drives and server ... fibre
drives in themselves wouldn't necessarily help support more than six
streams
because the bottleneck I've found so far is in the first place the network
between the switch and the server itself (when using 100mbit LAN) - going
to
a meatier switch with - say - 24 100mbit ports and a couple of gigabit
ports
then banging in a single gigabit link to the server will help a lot there.

After that it's the seek times of the drives (rather than the data
bandwidth
between drives and the server) that starts to play a major part - when
you're pulling multiple movies simultaneously off the same drive then the
drives get absolutely *CANED* whilst the actual data rates on the bus are
still very low.

After that I'd say that bandwidth on firewire or USB drives then becomes an
issue (of course if you're using IDE/SATA then data bandwidth isn't such an
issue and even less with SCSI / fibrechannel).

Phil