Media shared from USB

[masterluke]

Hi.. I have a number of Pi's running raspbmc in my house and they are all running beautifully. I stream my media (mostly SD MPEG4 and HD H264) from a windows 7 pc running hanewin nfs server. I am looking at removing this pc.

I frequently have this pc streaming different files to 2 devices at the same time.

I would ideally like to remove this pc and connect a powered 4tb usb hard disk to one of the Pi's.

My questions are as follows..

Would a Pi running raspbmc be able to operate normally (watch a video file from USB without slowdown and remain responsive) while serving another video file out to a second Pi?

What filesystem is best on the usb drive? It would be useful if I could use NTFS so I can also use the USB drive in a windows pc, but this is not essential and I could use something like ext4 if necessary.

Any advice?

[elatllat]

Likely.

NTFS is hard to get running fast.
I use LVM+ext4
(there is software to r/w ext4 on windows).
exfat, and fat32 can be good options.

[HiroProtagonist]

Would a Pi running raspbmc be able to operate normally (watch a video file from USB without slowdown and remain responsive) while serving another video file out to a second Pi?

What filesystem is best on the usb drive? It would be useful if I could use NTFS so I can also use the USB drive in a windows pc, but this is not essential and I could use something like ext4 if necessary.

This works absolutely fine.
You should use Ext4 if possible as this will minimise CPU load.
The trouble with the fat options is the file size is limited to 4GB.

[elatllat]

...The trouble with the fat options is the file size is limited to 4GB.

That is true for FAT32, exFAT has a file size limit of 128 PiB