So for the past year or so I’ve been using Infuse with just an external harddrive plugged into my router. The setup has been working just fine, but with me adding more and more 4K/HDR content, I’m finding that the USB 3 port on my router is hardly achieving USB 2 speeds so I’m getting a ton of buffering issues on 4K content.
Ultimately I’d go for a standard NAS solution, but I’m not looking to drop that amount of cash right now and I still have 4TB free on my external drive–I’d rather fill that and upgrade to a NAS later down the road (it’s taken me ~2 years to fill 4TB of the 8TB).
So in the meantime, I’m looking for a cheap solution to get my media to Infuse. I think all I need is a middle man between the router and the external drive that can actually achieve USB3 speeds. Would a Raspberry Pi be powerful enough? I’m assuming I won’t need anything beefy since Infuse will be handling any transcoding on the AppleTV, right? Could I possibly just get an older generation Mac Mini from eBay and use that? I guess I’m just unsure how powerful the middle device needs to be. I should mention that I’m a laptop-only house, so I don’t have an existing 24/7 machine to attach the drives to or else I wouldn’t have this issue!
Wasn’t aware of that model, that price isn’t too bad, even the 2 bay model (which I’d probably spring for just so I could RAID it). I see it has a USB port too which I could use with my existing external drive, cool. Thanks!
Your usb port shouldn’t be the problem - even usb 2 can do 60 MBps, and ‘filling up’ a hard drive shouldn’t be causing any issue either, especially only half full.
Check your router speeds first - i hapily use wifi 5g network from a good Asus router, not all routers are equal.
I should have been more specific. It’s not my network causing the issue, most devices are wired into the gigabit ethernet and my wifi connection is usually above 800 Mbps. It’s the physical router that’s the bottleneck, it’s puny router CPU can’t handle pushing data through it’s USB3 port fast enough. My last speedtest (using Black Magic) to the drive attached to my router was 12 Mb/s, not even close to the theoretical 60 USB2 should give me, let alone the fact it’s plugged into a USB3 port.