Quick question.

If you hook up a usb hard drive to the 520, would transfers, fast forward, rewind be quicker then wired ethernet pc?

no opinions?

Honest opinion would be I don't think you would see a dramatic improvement. FF/REW is limited by the product itself. I personally do not have issues with transfers so I do not think that the performance would be much better.


-Aaron

Plus the fact that the USB port on the DSM-520 only supports FAT/FAT32 formatted drives. I tried hooking a 250GB drive up to it and it wouldn't recognize it because it was an NTFS drive. I find it incredible in this day and age that a manufacturer would have that kind of a limitation.:confused: I guess they only want you to use thumbdrives. My 256 thumb drive works fine on it but you don't get many HD movies on a 256MB drive. I guess I could go get a 4GB thumb drive but why can't they open it up to work with NTFS drives? License fees to MS?

Mike

I have a 320GB drive working fine on the DSM-520. Granted, I reformatted it and made a big FAT32 partition, leaving a chunk of the drive unusable on the DLink box... grrr! Booted to Linux and used a partition manager to format >32GB easily.

With a bit of hacking around, you can get to the command line of a DSM-520 and try manually mounting the drives--the DSM-520 is a Linux computer after all. I tried to get a Linux partition mounted; that would be the real solution! Install the Linux driver in Windows, copy files over to that nice fat ext2/3 partition, and away you go! Appears that the startup code for the DSM only automounts FAT32 however.

Oh, wait, never answered the original question... in my home LAN, the USB HD works far better than any media streamer software does so far. This means I have to transcode stuff once to get it in the format the DSM-520 plays natively. I've had fine results with Windows Movie Maker at about 1MBit, and VirtualDub with a DivX codec.

The newer firmware (1.04+) lets you jump through a video file using the number keys. Press 5, and you're 50% through. Press 9, and you're near the end, etc.

Thanks Troy. I didn't realise the 520 was Linux based. I will format a drive ext2/3 and hunt down the Linux driver for windows. I just need to Google the commands to get to a Linux prompt on the 520. I vaguely remember about getting to a telnet prompt somewhere. I should be able to mount the usb drive then. I'm currently running the 520 wirelessly using the TVersity server software. It works nicely for most stuff but I would like to be able to view HD and the wireless G just doesn't quite have the oomph to do it without stuttering.

Thanks Troy :)

Thanks Troy. I didn't realise the 520 was Linux based. I will format a drive ext2/3 and hunt down the Linux driver for windows. I just need to Google the commands to get to a Linux prompt on the 520. I vaguely remember about getting to a telnet prompt somewhere. I should be able to mount the usb drive then. I'm currently running the 520 wirelessly using the TVersity server software. It works nicely for most stuff but I would like to be able to view HD and the wireless G just doesn't quite have the oomph to do it without stuttering.

Thanks Troy :)

Mike,
Having play around with the telnet interface, I might suggest that if you want to format your drive on ext2/3, and you don't current have a running
Linux system. Build you a CD or Thumbdrive bootable version of Linux. There are several out there, the last one I played with was Knoppix. Some of them have gui's to help with formating the media.

Secondly, NTFS support on Linux has not been support that long, at least for RW. I am no expert on Linux but am an experienced UNIX system administrator and when I was implementing a farm of RHEL v4 servers and I was surprised to find out that there was no native NTFS support. I had to install an RPM to get the support. That being said, depending upon which flavor of linux was the source for dsm-xxx series, it most likely never had the support.

Recently I purchase a small portable seagate and it was ntfs, I thought I would format it to FAT32, but in my attempt to convert it to FAT32, I found out that there is a limitation of 32Gb on 2000/XP, Win98 could format up to 127Gb. So I guess if you have a Win98 bootable floppy maybe that would be another way to format it....

Good Luck.
Mike