High speed switch for media server

[Chris-in-oz]

Hello,
I have a Netgear DG470N gigabit modem and I am streaming 1080P films from a 2TB networked hard drive onto a LG 42inch Smart TV viat wired ethernet. Sometimes the films crash and the TV cannot reopen the network folder with the film in until a reset is done on the modem. Is there a high speed gigabit switch that I can use to improve this or should I get some media controlling software?

 

[john-b691]

Not sure what netgear you mean but you should not crash the device because of traffic passing though the lan ports. Now if you are using this device as the NAS then that would not surprise me. A router is designed to pass traffic first and run as a network drive as a extra feature to print on the box.

Now if you have a actual NAS device then it should not crash the netgear. The traffic is passing switch port to switch port. I would have to be some kind of bug if it does.

You do not need any special gig switch. You can buy any $20 gig switch. They are all the same when you read the specs. You will find all say they can do 2x number of ports gig. This means they are full wirespeed non blocking. The funny thing most routers use the same exact asic chips to run the LAN ports as many of these switches.

 

[Chris-in-oz]

Hi John,

Thanks for your reply. My modem is a netgear gigabit DGND3700 (sorry I got the model number wrong in the original post). I am trying to stream 1080P films from a 2Tb hard drive that is connected via USB to the Modem, through an Ethernet connection to an LG smart TV. The films run perfectly for about 20-30 minutes then the TV reverts to terrestrial channels. When I try to connect back to the hard drive, the TV cannot see the files. After about 20 minutes or so, the TV is able to see the drive and we can start again. The last time it did this I checked the Modem and it felt extremely hot so it may be a heat dissipation issue? The same happened when I streamed music to the tv in the form of MP3's - after about 20 minutes it crashed. I must be doing something wrong.

 

[bill001g]

Sound like a bug in the netgear. Still you are putting a lot of burden on the netgear. It has manage a drive via the USB as well as encapsulate it in packets and send it to the TV. You would have to hope for some form of error message in the netgear log but I would not be real hopeful it exists.

I would try the standard apply the latest firmware and see what happens recommendation. Then I would put the 2t drive onto a PC that is ethernet connected to the router and share it from there just to confirm it is the router that has a issue and not the drive or controller.