I was not worried about the WIFI6 to be the bottle neck but the USB3.0 interface to my NVMe external enclosure. I saw one youtube video (GL.iNet GL-MT3000 and GL-AXT1800 Wi-Fi 6 Travel Routers - YouTube) showing that an external USB drive was only able to achieve 30MBps of read speeds, given I do not know the testers specific setup, but was striking that even over LAN which is 1Gb should have been able to push close to 100MB/s.
Heh; I was just having a little fun w/ those numbers. It wasn’t a shot at ya… okay, a little ribbing, perhaps.
[…] over LAN which is 1Gb should have been able to push close to 100MB/s.
Close. The theoretical best for GbE is 120 MBps. 125MB mathematically but TCP adds ~4.0% overhead in encapsulation, transmission, whatever. Mix in an overworked CPU & a crappy network interface card/driver with no TCP Offload Engine (TOE) chip & the rates can drop even lower… sub 600 Mbps or worse.
Yeah, I’ve seen that video. Faucher doesn’t know WTF he’s doing. You don’t use SpeedTest.net as an indication of full Wi-Fi/Repeater Mode’s max bandwidth availablity by hobbling it with a mere 230–240 Mbps ISP package for a bottleneck… otherwise we’d all still be using 802.11n, now known as Wi-Fi 4, which was ‘cutting edge’ in 2008.
As for his SAMBA test results: I almost guarantee he’s got some old 2.5" 5400RPM in a USB2.0 chassis. Did you notice the ‘Makeup Videos’ @ 12:40? That tells me that’s a dumping ground for his wife’s crap on an old drive he had kicking around.
Or maybe he like mascara. Who can tell these days?
30 MB/s is about what I see R/W on a junker Pentium 4 laptop I’ve got thrown in a closet running as a Syncthing node. I’d rather toss you the OpenWrt Wiki link & await your results.
LOL. No offense taken. I am no network engineer, but I get it, with my NVMe enclosure and WD SN770 bandwidth over the USB3 port should not be an issue.
Appreciate the info. Thank you
1 Like
If it helps, I just ran some file copies on a little Sandisk USB: 12-16 MB/s write, around 22-24 MB/s read, wifi 6 to a windows laptop. I don’t know how multiple streams would fare given Samba is single-threaded.
1 Like
Gross. I’ve never used SAMBA. I knew the overhead using it would be an issue but that… nah, I’ll never use it then.
What’s your baseline speeds for that disk using something like CrystalDiskMark or MediaTester?
Like SAMBA, Windows itself will add a touch of overhead, too. That OpenWrt Wiki link I’ve posted should give you a better idea of what to expect on the device… before killing the performance w/ SAMBA, of course.
Don’t know, don’t much care. More than fast enough for the OP. Sandisk advertises 130MB/s read.
I’m sure they do. Samsung advertises 400MB/s read for their FIT Plus USB 3.1, 256GB.
… but real world use says something quite different:
## CrystalDisk 8.04 x64
* 239GiB
* Stock FS: exFAT
* SEQ1M/8QT1: 412.13, 116.97 MB/s W
* SEQ1M/1QT1: 406.95, 117.12
* RND4K/Q32T1: 13.14, 23.13
* RND4K/Q1T1: 12.27, 21.23
Don’t believe everything you read, my guy… especially from marketers & politicians.
Well, my MT3000 will show up today. I will have plenty of time to test this and decide if I want to keep it or go a different route. The whole idea behind it is to be able to take it on the road and have a way for the kids to watch a movie to keep them occupied. Main selling points were low power consumption over a single usb-c port, small package and the ability to have secured wireless over VPN when at hotels.
… then you might not even need SAMBA. Don’t be afraid to ‘experiment’ w/ the minidlna media server. It’s available under GL GUI → Applications → Search → luci-app-minidlna
You’re going to want to first install then use LuCI to set it up (GL GUI → System → Advanced Settings).
Is the minidlna media server offering lower overhead than the built in package? what about WebDAV? DLNA limits me on what type of files I can serve I believe, but for sure will take a look.
WebDAV is HTTP based but I’ve never used it for streaming media.
MiniDLNA should be lower overhead; it was originally released about a decade ago 2009-07-09 to run off Netgear’s ReadyNAS series of Network Attached Storage. I can’t imagine those old NAS machines having the capabilities of your Beryl AX. It’s currently known as ReadyMedia.
As for media types:
Supported media formats
MiniDLNA supports a wide variety of video and audio file formats.
- Video: Files ending with .avi, .mp4, .mkv, .mpg, .mpeg, .wmv, .m4v, .flv, .mov, .3gp, etc.
- Audio: Files ending with .mp3, .ogg, .flac, .wav, .pcm, .wma, .fla, .aac, etc.
- Image: Files ending with .jpg, .jpeg
- Playlist: Files ending with .m3u, .pls
- Captions: Files ending with .srt, .smi
https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/MiniDLNA#Supported_media_formats
FYI: The Certa, a single CPU core, 650MHz device from 2017 w/ v. 3 firmware is listed to support MiniDNLA. I think you’ll be just fine.
Thank you. Appreciate all your input. I’ll post some info once I get it running.
Good to know. How about the Slate AX & Flint?
Using a Google Chromcast with Kodi (SMB) and an Android tablet also with Kodi (SMB) I was able to stream a 1080p movie with AC3 audio stream to both devices without hiccup (~8Mb/s streams both accessing the same file). That is plenty good for me. Then on my home PC I streamed 3 movies on Potplayer (bit rates between 3-8Mb/s) also no issue at all. I have some 20+Mb/s files I haven’t tested yet, but I can always reencode these to a more manageable bitrate.
Idle power consumption with the 1TB SN770 attached in the USB to NVMe enclosure is only 5.5W. Under load with three streams going the max I measured is 6.5W, which is perfect for my use case.
Overall very happy with this router. Will setup NordVPN next and assign the switch to the wireguard profile.
3 Likes
Congratulations! Those power draw figures are impressive enough never mind the SMB! Out of morbid curiosity what’s the CPU load & memory usage on your Beryl AX while those three streams over SMB are running (GL GUI → System → Overview)?
Unused RAM is wasted RAM… as the saying goes. Nice. Thanks for the mention of PotPlayer. I think I’ll try it. I could never get VLC to properly take a ‘dark’ skin.
That’s some good taste in movies you’ve got there. It’s much slower paced but if you want an underappreciated semi-‘psychological suspense’ movie set in the the post-Apocalypse, may I suggest Last Sentinel (2023)?
As we sail the seven seas…
Been a potplayer user for as long they have been around, first found them on video help. It plays just about anything you throw at it, has a in my opinion a better user interface than VLC, not just the skin, but just usability.