'Upgraded' hard drives, can no longer stream videos (plex) and game (bf4) simultaneously.

[cbob]

So previously I had an old 320GB Seagate Barracuda and a 1TB WD Green. My SO could stream movies off the WD Green (via plex) and I could play Battlefield 4 installed on the Seagate with no issues.

I decided to upgrade (or so I thought!), so I bought a 1TB WD Black for my games and a 2TB WD Green for storage. Now, both my game and the streaming of videos is suffering from a whole lot of stuttering when I try both simultaneously.

Could it be a software/firmware issue? I haven't installed any special drivers - just whatever comes with Windows 7 I suppose. Could it be that the WD Black uses up more resources?

Oh, I did also recently go fully wireless instead of having my 'gaming' PC wired as it was previously. It's 300mpbs wireless though (full signal strength), so I figure it's faster than the 100mpbs wired was anyways!

 

[smitbret]

So previously I had an old 320GB Seagate Barracuda and a 1TB WD Green. My SO could stream movies off the WD Green (via plex) and I could play Battlefield 4 installed on the Seagate with no issues.

I decided to upgrade (or so I thought!), so I bought a 1TB WD Black for my games and a 2TB WD Green for storage. Now, both my game and the streaming of videos is suffering from a whole lot of stuttering when I try both simultaneously.

Could it be a software/firmware issue? I haven't installed any special drivers - just whatever comes with Windows 7 I suppose. Could it be that the WD Black uses up more resources?

Oh, I did also recently go fully wireless instead of having my 'gaming' PC wired as it was previously. It's 300mpbs wireless though (full signal strength), so I figure it's faster than the 100mpbs wired was anyways!

Think I found your problem. 300mbps is just a marketing tool. While it does indicate the potential uplink speed between the router and the client, your real world performance will be less than half of that, even in an ideal situation. With an n300, the best I would ever reasonably expect to achieve on a consistent basis is about 80mbps. That's assuming the router and the adapter are BOTH n300. If one of them is running n150 or even wireless g then challenges will erupt.

Any newer drive (like the Black or even the Green) should be able to playback 5-8 streams of video simultaneously. In fact, if that Black has a 1TB platter then it is probably 3 times faster than that old Barracuda. HDDs are pretty much a commodity as far as the OS is concerned so it's probably not a driver issue.

Is it possible to disable the wireless and run the ethernet cable again as a test?

 

[cbob]

Think I found your problem. 300mbps is just a marketing tool. While it does indicate the potential uplink speed between the router and the client, your real world performance will be less than half of that, even in an ideal situation.

But surely that might only explain the stuttering of the video streaming through plex (and it doesn't have problem streaming when I'm not playing bf4). My wireless connection surely can't have anything to do with affecting my game's performance. I'll be experimenting with a wired cable later on and report back.

 

[smitbret]

Think I found your problem. 300mbps is just a marketing tool. While it does indicate the potential uplink speed between the router and the client, your real world performance will be less than half of that, even in an ideal situation.

But surely that might only explain the stuttering of the video streaming through plex (and it doesn't have problem streaming when I'm not playing bf4). My wireless connection surely can't have anything to do with affecting my game's performance. I'll be experimenting with a wired cable later on and report back.

What's your CPU?
What type of video file are you streaming?
What device are you streaming the video to?

Sounds like it could be a transcoding issue for a CPU that isn't powerful enough to transcode on the fly.

 

[cbob]

It's never been an issue before I installed the new hard drives though. Apart from that and the wireless, nothing else has changed.

CPU: 1st gen quad-core i5
GPU: AMD HD 7850
Streaming to a TV via Chromecast

I've had 1080p movies streaming before with no issues - when I encountered this problem the other night, my SO was just tryna stream a 480p series.

As I mentioned, I'll try again very shortly using a wired connection.

 

[smitbret]

It's never been an issue before I installed the new hard drives though. Apart from that and the wireless, nothing else has changed.

CPU: 1st gen quad-core i5
GPU: AMD HD 7850
Streaming to a TV via Chromecast

I've had 1080p movies streaming before with no issues - when I encountered this problem the other night, my SO was just tryna stream a 480p series.

As I mentioned, I'll try again very shortly using a wired connection.

You, my friend, have a good mystery. That CPU is plenty powerful enough.

Let me know how the wire test goes. We'll figure this out.

 

[cbob]

So it turns out your first instinct was correct! Tested multiple times with both wired and wireless and yup, had no problems at all with wired. Am bummed though, thought if I bought a n300 router and 300mbps receiver all would be wonderful :/

EDIT: Urg, I hate marketing tactics!

 

[smitbret]

So it turns out your first instinct was correct! Tested multiple times with both wired and wireless and yup, had no problems at all with wired. Am bummed though, thought if I bought a n300 router and 300mbps receiver all would be wonderful :/

Yeah, that's typical. Sorry.

 

[cbob]

So okay, appreciate all the help, and that's just how it is then, but I wanna try and avoid running cables ...so I wanna try come up with a solution.

I had a thought of buying a hard-drive enclosure for my WD Green and then plugging it in via USB to the router (it has a USB port). Now that'll no doubt solve this issue, right? But then I guess actually writing to this hard drive from the PC is gonna be a helluva lot slower (since I'll then be accessing it over wireless)... hmmm.

 

[smitbret]

So okay, appreciate all the help, and that's just how it is then, but I wanna try and avoid running cables ...so I wanna try come up with a solution.

I had a thought of buying a hard-drive enclosure for my WD Green and then plugging it in via USB to the router (it has a USB port). Now that'll no doubt solve this issue, right? But then I guess actually writing to this hard drive from the PC is gonna be a helluva lot slower (since I'll then be accessing it over wireless)... hmmm.

If you are willing to invest in a wireless AC router or AP as well as AC adapters and/or bridges then it could work wirelessly. Keep in mind that AC works only on the 5GHz band and would have about half the range of 2.4GHz so you'd need to plan accordingly. I had a wireless AC bridge set up between two of these for awhile and it worked well for HD streaming:

http://www.amazon.com/TP-LINK-Archer-C7-Wireless-1350Mbps/dp/B00BUSDVBQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1416164741&sr=8-1&keywords=archer+C7

If it's just one or two other locations you might just invest in an AC router or AP and then just get some adapters for each location.

Don't know how much you know about wireless networking but it's something that you could certainly learn if you are willing to drop some money on it.

Powerline adapters might be an option if your electrical wiring is in good shape or MoCA would work if you have open coax connections between locations.