Wireless Transfer Rate

[gottaluvlasers]

OK Computer gurus-

In my office downstairs in my house i have my new desktop computer. upstairs in my living room i have 1 of my plasma TV's and connected to that, is a WDT Live Digital Media Player.

Attached to the WDTV is a 2 TB hard drive and a wireless N+ USB adapter. What i do is downstairs on the new, turbo space shuttle computer, i rip all of my blu rays to that computers hard drive. then i want to transfer the blu rays through my network up to the WDTV Live. the downstairs computer is connected to my network hub via ethernet cord. Then the media player upstairs is connected to the network via the USB N+ adapter.

The problem i am running into is my transfer rate from my computer downstairs to the WDTV upstairs is agonizingly slow. ~2.5MB-3.5MB/sec. Why so slow? shouldnt this be MUCH MUCH MUCH faster? at least into the 30-50MB/sec range? Right now i am transfering a movie and it is 2.14MB/sec. the transfer is taking 3X as long as the movie is!!

Any ideas? advice?

-Marc

[allthatwhichis]

I suspect you are not getting good RSSI in the upstairs room. How many barriers are you going through? I would do all of my transfers over wire; wireless is only for surfing the web in my opinion. You may also want to try and set the transfer rate on your card and/or router. It defaulting to 2-5Mb/s; you might be able to force it to 54.

[chad]

Just another little thing you might want to try is change your wireless channel. I run on channel 10. That seems to have the least stuff on it. A ton of routers default to channel 6.

A friend has a little 2.4 ghz spectrum analyzer and anything in the 2.4 rage seems to blast around channel 6.

Just one other little thing you can try. Also play with antenna angles, up vs sideways and rotate and spin. RF is voodo.

chad

[loopee]

Hey Marc

As Chad suggested look at changing the channels, as you are in US there are 11 channels with only three clear channels that don't overlap 1, 6 and 11, so try changing to one of them.

Another thing, when you set it up did you select WPA2? (with AES) 802.11N will only give full speed when configured with no authentication/encryption or WPA2 with AES encryption.

With 802.11N on 2.4Ghz only you will only be able to get a maximum of 72.2Mbps connected rate (not true throughput) for a single MIMO channel, if your wireless devices are true "N" capable devices then they should be capable of 144Mbps (using two MIMO streams) if you have a proper certified 802.11ABGN device you should be able to get 300Mbps connection over short distance.

Most of the domestic grade wireless devices misrepresent the 802.11N protocol for sales, if the devices do not have the WIFI Alliance 802.11ABGN or 802.11BGN certification stickers on them they most likely do not fully support 802.11N

Troy

[aijii]

also watch our for other sources of 2.4GHZ like microwaves and some cordless phones.

One client of ours complained about intermittently poor wireless performance during lunch times in a small office. We did a simple test with and without the microwave running. Microwave off = great coverage, high throughput. Microwave on = shit performance.

I had the same problem with an el cheapo 2.4GHZ cordless phone at home.

Worst case if wireless proves unworkable, you could try ethernet over power. There are some good solutions available commercially here in Oz, and you can may be able to get up to bi-directional and theoretical 100Mb/s (branded as 200Mb/s, cheeky)

Or just run a cable

[loopee]

Other sources of interference on the 2.4Ghz spectrum

Wireless security cameras (the analogue variety) and....

Marc, you've only just had a baby haven't you, do you have a wireless baby monitor?

Typically they use 2.4Ghz as well

[flecom]

Other sources of interference on the 2.4Ghz spectrum

Wireless security cameras (the analogue variety) and....

Marc, you've only just had a baby haven't you, do you have a wireless baby monitor?

Typically they use 2.4Ghz as well

ehh, I havent seen many baby monitors on 2.4ghz... most are on 433/438mhz, some on 900mhz etc...

802.11N is "150mbits" so /8 is 18.75MBps... and thats only in a vaccume inside of a RF proof chamber... so assuming for losses and removing most of the marketing BS and such, 50% loss (not uncommon) is 9.375MBps...

so ya, 3MBps is pretty low, I would assume noise, weak signal, or other devices/traffic on the WLAN... and remember that only one device can "talk" at a time

if your moving blurays around you really need gigabit ethernet... I have gige and even then moving around 50GB blu-ray ISO's is pretty painful... which is why I just play them all off my file server... easier

[gottaluvlasers]

Hey guys-

thank you all for the input. it seems as if the WDTV Live is uncapable of transfering to the attached HD at these rates? I tried reading through some of their forums also (thank GOD we dont have "moderators" here!!) and it seems as if many people are having these problmes.

As a troubleshooting test i attached the external HD and the same wireless adapter to a computer i have up there also and the transfer rate was >50mW. so, it is a hardware isue it seems with this WDTV Live (which pisses me off!!)

Some people are having success formatting their attached drives to "NFS?" i am unsure how to format a drive for NFS. the drive scrubbers and partition progrmas i use only ask for FAT or NTFS. any ideas on this one??

Oh, and Loopee---

bite your tongue!!! LOL...no kiddies yet! the world is NOT ready for another one of me yet!

-Marc

[flecom]

NFS is not a file system, its a way of transferring files over a network, like say, FTP, Samba, etc