I compared download speeds of the Empeg (over ethernet) vs. the AudioRequest home player. The Empeg seems to transfer files at about half the rate. Has anyone benchmarked to see if it was really doing 10Mb? I suspect something on the empeg is slowing it down from running at wire speed.

The empeg currently runs the same protocol over all connections - serial, USB, TCP socket. The protocol is fully error corrected and doesn't take advantage of the fact that TCP connections (and USB, if the stack is behaving itself) are already sequenced, error-free links.

This explains the slower-than-wire speed transfers. We will be addressing this in future releases - fyi, we can sustain 1Mb/sec from ethernet to disk using ftp on the unit, so there's no hardware problem :)

Hugo

You must mean approximately 1MB/s transfer rate (one megabyte per second) as the Ethernet link itself is 10Mbit/s (ten megabits per second, 1 byte has 8 bits)..

I know You knew this and just made a typo with the small b, bytes and bits are just too easy to mess up.. just thought to clear it up for some wild eyed anonymous readers ;)..

So FYI others the Empeg mk.2 ethernet 'hardware' is as efficient as any 10Mbit Ethernet card in a powerful desktop computer. 100Mbit Ethernet cards seem to be the 'sport' these days but I'd trust that STILL atleast 80% of the hubs and switches out there in the big wild deliver only 10Mbit/s connections to the workstation end. The company what I work for has invested in auto-sensing 10/100 Mbit/s Ethernet (twisted pair) switches and a 1Gbit/s FX frame but still most of the machines are behind switched 10Mbit/s twisted pair, even if the machines themselves were equipped with a 100Mbit/s Ethernet card (such as a 3Com 905C). Call it practical and cost effective with a network of 450 computers.

With a 100Mbit/s connection you are likely to end up with transfer rates of 2.5MB/s to 6.8MB/s, depending on the other hardware (processor, harddrives) and OS of your machine (at the moment).


Antti 'Amarth' Luostarinen
#14229 in queue
try BatMUD - telnet bat.org ;)

100Mbit wasn't really an option: board space, bus bandwidth and PIO only on the disk drives (there are no external DMA channels on the SA1100) meant that it simply wasn't worth it. 10Mbit is still pretty fast...

Hugo

True. You're still theoretically able to reach transfer speeds up to 1250kB/s (kilobytes) but with all the other stuff transferred (IP header fields etcetc) with the actual data you'll be looking for a fair 1MB/s.. I don't see this a problem either since it's most likely more than what you would get from your local server (diskpool, warez dump,..whatever ;P..)..


Antti 'Amarth' Luostarinen
#14229 no clue how I'm going to pay this..(cc)
try BatMUD - telnet bat.org ;)