The internal HDD controller chipset for the PCH (and similar players) is extremely slow.  This is for two reasons:

1. Cost of chipset
2. Power (remember, all power you consume becomes heat)

As such, there is no way you will get more than a few MB (I estimate 5 MB/s, 50Mb/s) in actual read/write speed to the disk.  There simply isn't enough horsepower there, and insufficient use of NCQ, etc.

Why is this not a problem, normally?  Think of the files you play.  A 720p movie, 90 mins, is 2GB.  So you need 22MB/min read speed.  That is MUCH LESS THAN 1MB/s !!!!  (Sorry for shouting. but this is critical).  Compare this to the 5MB/s that you can achieve.  You have enough headroom for even your 10GB movie rips.

So in normal practice, when using the PCH as a media player, disk speed is so low a constraint that you would not even bother to benchmark.  That is why it makes no difference if you have a 10000RPM Raptor, or a cheap USB dongle, for playing your BR Rips. 

(And this is the entire point of x264, mp4, etc.  We are using compression to lower the physical bit rate required).

However, if you use the PCH as a NAS, and start expecting it to serve your 200MB photoshop.psd file, you WILL hit speed bumps.

You may achieve 20MB/s over the network interface (I have my doubts, the Gigabit chip is being run in a low-power mode as well), but there in no place for the PCH to write a 20MB/s stream to.

(And by the way, most nome NAS boxes also claim Gigabit interfaces, but their disk access speed is poor. )

--
Sanjeev Gupta
Happy PCH user for 4 years


thanks for the heads up, i held back on 1 generation of media players for this reason, guess it'll be the same still now.

There is another reason to expect a high transfer speed which is to directly store downloaded movie files. But at 5-10Mb/S isn't it just plain slow ? With a 3.5in HDD inside, it'll take days to fill up 1TB no?