Hi,
My media is stored in an HDD enclosure connected to Vero 4k+ through USB.
I use a PC to transfer files to this HDD using Filezilla and SMB.
What I’d like to know is, in case I replace the enclosure with a NAS:
a. Will I see any difference in transfer rates?
b. Will it be possible to download files using the PC directly to the HDD instead of downloading them to the PC and then transferring them to the HDD using Filezilla as I do today?
Cheers,
Ilan
You can already do B, just map the SMB share as a mapped drive and then you can ‘touch’ files directly from the PC. It still goes through the Vero but you don’t have to use FileZilla.
You didn’t say what your using now, what speeds your getting now, or what you were looking at getting. A Vero V with a ext4 formatted drive connected via gigabit ethernet is capable of around 95MB/s in my testing. A PC or NAS using gigabit ethernet might get up to around 111MB/s with a SMB transfer which is a limit of the network interface itself.
If by this you mean torrent then it depends on what device you purchase. If your just talking about using it as a target from Windows my preference is to just use UNC paths (ie \\hostname\sharename) which you can pin in Explorer for easy quick access, or just make a shortcut on your desktop or wherever to navigate through to your network share (which is usually much faster than going through the network section in Explorer).
He said a Vero 4K+, though - and you’d be lucky to get 40MB/s out of that, thanks to USB 2.0 limitations.
I’m currently using a wifi 5g connection because I don’t have an ethernet socket near so my rates are quite low. I plan on renovating soon and have a socket installed to get maximum speed. I also have a Vero V which I haven’t got around to installing yet so currently I’m using the 4k+. 95 vs 111 MB/s doesn’t seem like a huge difference to me, not sure investing in a NAS is worth it if this is the difference. Do the UNC paths require using a NAS or is it also available with an enclosure?
For any device in your network a Vero V + Enclosure will be like a NAS
UNC paths are just one way you can interact with an SMB share. It is an alternative to the other suggestion to map the share in windows (which is where you assign a network location a drive letter). A UNC path is just two backslashes followed by a hostname or IP address and then the file path to the network share. You can treat it like you would any other file path in Windows. For example you can just open Windows Explorer and in the address bar type in \\192.168.0.10\osmc (using the actual IP address of your Vero and making sure you have samba installed from the My OSMC add-on) and it will show the home folder of your device. If you put in just \\192.168.0.10\ you would also see a drive you have plugged into the device. You could right click and copy that folder/share and then go to your desktop and right click and paste shortcut. You could then use that shortcut to drop files into. With Windows 11 you could also pin it to the quick access bar and drag and drop that way.
As for the NAS purchase you might want to just try using your Vero V for the task first and see how you get on. The speeds are going to be slower over wifi but that is going to be true if you have a NAS wired such that it has to go over that link as well. I would strongly suggest for using a Vero as a file share to format the drive as ext4 as that is going to provide significantly better speed. The downsides to doing this is that you will not be able to (without 3rd party software at least) read the drive directly attached to Windows and you would need to format the drive in Linux (ie via ssh on the Vero) with some people might find rather intimidating.
Thanks for all the answers. I’ll try setting up the Vero V as a NAS.
That’s what I do, I have a standard USB drive plugged into the Vero and have installed the SMB server from the App Store and this combination means the Vero acts as my NAS on my home network. I can read and write to this from my main computer across the network. I typically only really write to the Vero as I use it as a backup for my main computer but I could equally use this as the main hub on the network and read from this from other devices.
At work I’ve been a storage administrator dealing with a variety of NAS and SAN solutions so the last thing I wanted was to have one at home too, this was I have enough of a solution to give me what I required but without the complexity and cost that I wasn’t interested in.