Netgear R700- Router USB Share Drive - format in NTFS or ext3 for media playback?

[pbcsd007]

Hi Guys,

I've got a USB 3.0 3TB Seagate external drive I want to use as a storage device with my USB3.0 Netgear R7000 capable router. Effectively want to be able to rip some of my blurays to mkv format and play it off my XBMC devices directly from the router.

Seems to be a lot of discussion around whether to use an ext3 partition or an NTFS partition. Main concern is read/write speed off of the USB device. I have formatted the drive in ext3 for now with a Swap partition in NTFS (not sure where I read it but somewhere someone mentioned formatting the primary as a small 512mb swap in NTFS and then teh second as a logical ext3 partition).

I am using ext2fsd to read the partition on my Windows devices.

When transferring 18-30GB rips, the transfer rates are 20mbps with a direct connection to my older laptop (USB 2.0 only), or if I do it via wireless I get 10-13mbps.

Just curious if these sound alright (takes forever to save the movie on the drive) or if the speeds sound off, and/or if I should have gone with NTFS for possibly faster speeds over Windows devices?

Any help would be appreciated!

Tx

 

[Jones2112]

I have an old Seagate 500GB Go Drive formatted in NTFS sitting in a dock which is connected to a NetGear WNDR4500 N900 router (readyshare) and it works fine for streaming movies wirelessly to XBMC which is on a Matricom Midnight MX2 HTPC connected to my TV.

Writing movies to the drive is a bit slow but I think that is just the nature of USB 2.0 (in my case). I have several other high end NAS devices on my network but I just use that particular Seagate drive for certain movies and other garbage. You really need to get a NAS instead of using a USB drive for writing/streaming movies as they connect via Ethernet instead of USB and are designed for what you plan on doing...

I have no idea what extfsd is so I can't help you there...

Just sharing my experience...