External HD Requirements

[jasnw]

I'm starting to plan a cut-the-cord setup using Tablo and AppleTV. I want to put an external HD on the Tablo (the original two-tuner system), and am thinking of going my usual route for external drives of a WB Red (3TB) inside an OWC box. I have many of these WBRed+OWC drives that I've been using as a Mini-based NAS, and they work fine. I'm just worried that a 5400RPM spinner might not be fast enough for streaming video. Any thoughts on this? I'll be running this all in a wired setup, no wireless links, and will have no more than two TVs on at any given time.

 

[d21mike]

I use a competitor to Tablo and heard it is very slow in general,. But simple setup solution. However, I do not think the 5400RPM Drives would be a problem.

 

[cynics]

I'm starting to plan a cut-the-cord setup using Tablo and AppleTV. I want to put an external HD on the Tablo (the original two-tuner system), and am thinking of going my usual route for external drives of a WB Red (3TB) inside an OWC box. I have many of these WBRed+OWC drives that I've been using as a Mini-based NAS, and they work fine. I'm just worried that a 5400RPM spinner might not be fast enough for streaming video. Any thoughts on this? I'll be running this all in a wired setup, no wireless links, and will have no more than two TVs on at any given time.

That WD Red is more than sufficient for streaming video, especially video actually. Since its a single file being accessed on a dedicated device you'll see the majority of its sequential read speeds which can saturate gigabit ethernet and real world wifi AC speeds.

Real world example, I can stream uncompressed blu ray rip (up to near 40gb MKV file) from a WD Red in my NAS on the ATV4's ethernet which is 10/100BASE-T with NO problems. I don't do it often but movies I love I'll keep and watch the ripped MKVs for maximum fidelity.

Keep in mind a WD Red seq read = ~150 megabytes per second ~ 1200 megabits per second.

Even UHD HDR content I've downloaded to test on my HDR TV plays fine from a WD Red.

And although there is a massive hit to performance for random read performance (multiple users simultaneously) bitrate isn't linear in a movie and many ATV apps can buffer the data so it can usually stay ahead of the curve in my experience.