02-01-2016, 05:44 PM
As far as the front-end, purely from a speed POV and not hardware/driver capabilities POV - Your network speed will likely be your bottleneck. Depending on which software you use to render your streaming media, it may not even use the local storage to "cache" the streamed data. It might stream to an area in RAM and then be retrieved from there. You can also do things like NFS mounting, in which case it will render directly from your NAS drive(s). Would USB be too slow on the backend... probably? Again, depends on how you've encoded, bitrates, what else will be using the drives at the same time, etc. USB drives make for nice, cheap, decent backup (but not mission critical data - RAID does that) on a NAS setup, because they're big and cheap and nobody cares that they're relatively slow. Could you possibly stream a 1-1 file (just basic streaming over NFS), yeah if it was a low enough bitrate file.
I hope that helps!
-Chad
I hope that helps!
-Chad