View Full Version : What is the fastest network filesystem for XBMC? (NFS, SMB, etc)
I've just finished setting up a Windows 2008 Server machine at home (I'm an MSDN subscriber) and it supports several different network filesystems such as SMB2 and NFS.
I'm using Ubuntu 9.04 and XBMC (svn) but I'm not sure which filesystem would give me the best performance.
Should I use SMB2? Does Ubuntu 9.04/XBMC support SMB2 versus SMB1?
Should I use NFS?
Should I use something else? (iSCSI? I don't think Server 2008 natively supports this though)
Thanks for any help!
althekiller
2009-08-19, 20:10
These are all linux questions. The only thing that XBMC supports natively out of your list is smb, which I haven't seen a performance difference between local mounts and libsmbclient accesses (though others claim to have). Any of the others would have to be localmount so XBMC will just think they're any other mount point. You need to dig up general benchmarks at your favorite linux site.
What is to idea? To access media on the win2008 over the network from XBMC?
If so I am pretty sure your network is a more likely bottleneck than the fileformat.
Thanks for the replies!
althekiller: Does libsmbclient support SMB2? (eg. the version you're using at least in the SVN)
vikjon0: Right. I'm trying to use my W2K8 server as a file server and access the files on my Ubuntu/XBMC box. I'm using gigabit ethernet so I want to get the closest to local HD speeds as possible. (eg. NFS might have much lower overhead/latency than SMB, SMB2 is much better than SMB, etc)
I'll do some more research on this question over at the Ubuntu forums but if you get a chance to let me know about libsmbclient I'd appreciate it.
Thanks!
althekiller
2009-08-19, 20:48
I dunno, google broken or something?
mythmaster
2009-08-20, 01:22
I'd think that iSCSI would be the fastest.
http://edge.technet.com/Media/How-to-setup-iSCSI-on-Windows-Server-2008-11-mins/
lnx-user
2009-09-01, 12:30
Well as far as remote filesystems go:
Fiberchannel
ISCSI
NFS
SAMBA
Unfortunately setting it up just right samba is easiest down to fiberchannel being the hardest. I'm using NFS myself.
One thing to remember is that ISCSI is not a networked filesystem like NFS and samba are. It's a networked block device or harddisk. That means that you client os gets control of the on disk filesystem format. This is great for performance etc. but it is also pretty hard to setup in a share filesystem setup.
If you want to access you shared storage with multiple systems at the same time it would need to support a clusterd filesystem. Windows doesn't have it. Your only choice here would be to use linux with something like GFS2 or something like it.
I would recomend setting it up if you're not a clustering expert. And since you're asking this question I assume you're not ;)
Stick with NFS or Samba for now!