E02 vs. P21 speed and capabilities?

[blupog]

I, like many others bought what I thought was the P21(V3) from buy.com and received the E02(V2).
I am able to stream .iso bluray backups(blurays max around 50-60 Mbps, ?54) to the computers in my house, one of my main goals at the time of purchase. If I am stressing the E02 too much with the bluray streaming vs. potentially the P21, I would hate for it to fail early.

Does anyone know the true functional speed differences between the two and any potential capability differences. Read/write speed differences?

Is it worth trying to switch the E02 for P21? How much memory is truly necessary(including any modding)? Is there any significant disadvantge to 128Mb vs. 256Mb?

[WarheadsSE]

xenoxaos uses a GoFlex Net (1.2Ghz kirkwood with 128MB) to stream his blu-rays to his XBMC, so he'll want to chime in.

[telzey]

I'm still waiting for another delivery from buy.com, but I hope that I get an E02 as I'm curious to personally test the difference. I already have quite a few P21s

AFAIK they're both similar on raw processing speed. The P21 has a slight theoretical advantage with 2x700 vs 1x1200, but it'll make little difference in practice given cache sizes, cache flushing and finding tasks that can be multi-threaded.

You're wanting to stream 8Mbyte/sec which should be easily within the capabilities of either machine (wired, not wireless).

The P21 has faster disk access through SATA than the E02 can possibly have through USB, but real-world usage narrows the difference. AFAIK the E02 does not have a hidden SATA port like the P21 does.

On my P21 I'm getting a raw read speed of 66MB/s with my SATA disk and 24MB/s with my USB disk. That's on the P21 itself with hdparm -t.

By the time it's sharing those disks over samba, that goes down to approx 35MB/s with SATA and 21MB/s with USB.

I'm expecting that the E02 would be similar to the P21's USB speed, i.e. lower than the P21 with SATA, but comfortably faster than you need.

The extra memory on the E02 won't make any difference if you're only using the machine for streaming, but it might be useful if you start to do more with it.

[blupog]

Thanks for the replies.

I actually am already streaming backups of my blurays as .iso's. It actually does stream via
wireless n to an XP machine without any stuttering. I am currently simply using the pogoplug
software. I have not yet modded the E02.

It sounds like overall, you think there would be some data throughput advantages, but as
you said, the necessity for my current purposes is not there. If I am to do large data transfers,
it may be something that would be useful. Is the eSATA connector accessible without opening
the P21 machine?

[WarheadsSE]

No. The SATA connector is not. It does not come with an eSATA connection of any kind.

[telzey]

My not-really-a-P21-actually-an-E02 arrived this weekend

It's a very nice machine! Runs considerably warmer than my P21, but it was really easy to hack.

Honestly, you've got very little reason to switch from an E02 to a P21, and some reasons not to.

The SATA speed difference isn't going to be that noticable for any kind of NAS streaming, only for doing local work on the P21 itself (i.e. web serving or compiling). If you're determined to do those, then a GoFlex Net is another alternative that you should consider.

The SATA port on the P21 is on the motherboard inside the case. To get normal access to it you're going to have to modify the case somehow.

I believe that WarheadsSE added a SATA-to-eSATA adapter cable and mounted the eSATA port inside his case.

Someone mentioned using a SATA-to-SATA cable and taking power from a USB port for a 2.5" drive.

Personally, I used a 7/8" DeWalt hole saw to drill a hole through the case above the SATA port and just plug in a SATA-to-eSATA transition cable that connects directly to my eSATA drive.

One more thing ... if you were to choose the eSATA route, then you need to know that not every eSATA enclosure is compatible with the stage0 boot ROM built into the CPU on the P21.

For instance, my Vantec NST360-SU works fine, but my Rosewill 2.5" eSATA/USB enclosure hangs up the pogo in a boot loop. The same Rosewill enclosure works fine in USB mode once the kernel has booted.