location of minimserver on network

[DavidHB]

(09-05-2015 16:35)DavidZ Wrote:  I used jriver on the zuma as server and renderer, with my files on the synology nas. Playback was 100% smooth. Of course, I don't know how sound quality might have been affected.

I doubt that SQ would have been affected if streaming was smooth, but, as you say, this is difficult to prove. On the main point, all servers are not the same; if they were, I wouldn't be using MinimServer. I cannot of course say whether there would be performance degradation on your particular system. All I can do is refer you to Simon's clear and specific advice, which must have some logic behind it. Also, from the way Simon has written and documented MinimServer and from his posts on the forum, I would expect that he made a number of tests before coming up with his advice.

It is a pity that Simon is away at present, and therefore not posting a s frequently as usual. Only he can give detailed reasons for his advice. My own guess FWIW is that, because MinimServer works with multiple indexes 'on the fly', it generates a lot of file access, and this is what prompts his advice. But, as I say, that's only a guess.

(09-05-2015 16:35)DavidZ Wrote:  Also, on a related note, Mark Jenkins (of Antipodes) has suggested mounting the Nas drive. My impression is that this is a way to have the OS view it as an external drive and avoid the SMB issue you mentioned. Make sense?

I presume that the suggestion is that the network share from the NAS should be mounted as a drive in the PC. This is a common, if now rather antiquated, technique, and is valuable where software applications cannot recognise SMB addresses. But AFAIK SMB is still used as the network file system protocol, and there is no alternative to using it in Windows. SMB has been progressively updated with different releases of Windows, and I dare say that implementations on different NASs (typically through SAMBA, which implements SMB on Unix-like systems, and so allows them to share files with Windows) also vary. So we are dealing with a range of possible configurations. But some (and usually more than one) form of SMB will be a factor common to all of them.

David