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Netgear RAXE500 SMB (SAMBA) Readyshare USB3.0 slow/ buggy on Android
Hi, just bought the RAXE500 router to replace the RAX80. I'm very happy with the WiFI performance on it compared to my previous RAX80. The only issue which I and many others I believe are facing ...
The workaround for playing High Bitrate files I suppose is using a DLNA player instead of the normal SMB (Samba) server on Android.
And for transferring files FTP works best for android.
Samba is slow on this router.
Even my older WiFi 5 router, Netgear R7800 can get me upto 30 Mb/sec writes and reads through SMB samba, so 6-7 Mb/sec on Android is nothing. Only good for 1080p videos.
And for transferring files FTP works best for android.
Samba is slow on this router.
Even my older WiFi 5 router, Netgear R7800 can get me upto 30 Mb/sec writes and reads through SMB samba, so 6-7 Mb/sec on Android is nothing. Only good for 1080p videos.
For me, on Android, both my R7800 and RAXE500, the SMB performance is the same for both USB 3 connected drives and eSATA. Though on desktop, the eSATA performance on the R7800 is much higher with some 3rd party firmware, hitting 90+MB/s while USB 3.0 will be in the 70MB/s range.
The SMB performance issues with android are weird with no real consistency between devices, which performance all over the place on low end, mid range, and high end devices.
The same applies to older SMB standards such as SMB 1.5 on older 802.11n based routers with speeds still in the 6-7MB/s range. This is with high end ones from the time period (WNDR4700) which has a read speed of about 98MB/s and a write speed of 45MB/s, using an internal hard drive that came with my WNDR4700.
Overall for SMB I am not sure if router makers can do much to improve smartphone performance with them. It seems that router makers go with fairly standard implementations, and smartphone makers simply aren't focusing their development time on improving performance for SMB traffic.
As for speeds in relation to video playback, 5MB/s is enough for most h.264 4K 10 bit HDR content, as they are typically in the 20-30mbps range, though it will not handle h.264 4K 10 bit with 4:2:2 sampling, though in those conditions, h.265 will work.
If you would like to test that, you will see that launching a video over smb using a file explorer app that supports it, and then directly opening the video using VLC for android, you will see that that combination of videos will play smoothly.
Beyond that, VLC player's own browser rather than launching through another app is capable of reaching higher speeds by launching multiple connections for newer SMB versions (though that behavior would normally reduce performance for a desktop PC since SMB in general encounters more overhead from it, but on android the benefits there outweigh the inefficiencies.