Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Networking questions....

Mark I thought you had a DROBO?

I am running an 8 port switch for all my HT stuff, Wii, Xbox, BR player, Denon 3808 etc. which feeds down to my Netgear 3700 router. I also have a second 8 port switch feeding into the Netgear router. This switch links the rest of the house computers and my NAS together as well as feeding them the internet from the router.

I should write out my network sometime. And also put in that Cisco firewall I've got lying around. Then it will be truly absurd... 3 devices with switches built in in a room with one other piece of network equipment. Everything else goes in other rooms.

Jason, I questioned a DROBO at one point, but I can't seem to get past the very mediocre...even poor...reviews. I feel like I would never fully trust it's reliability, and if you can't do that, what's the point?

I wonder about a NAS with redundancy RAID, though... even though I'm likely to keep my photos local on my Photoshop computer. It might be great for music streaming to my Denon or for casual, personal photos.

My game plan is to transfer ALL of my photos (from the last 12 years of being digital) onto an extra 2TB internal drive I mounted on my PS computer, and index them all with keywords in LightRoom as I go along. Once they're indexed, I can offload the majority of them onto two separate external drives which I'll keep off-premises in two different locations. I just bought a 64GB USB 3.0 stick for doing the transferring.

Only then, will I feel updated, organized and secure as far as they are concerned.

Unfortunately, as with many other things, it's such a huge job and requires enough concentration that I can't simply do it "10 minutes here, 10 minutes there". And again, with so many other things in my life, it's not getting done because I'm too busy treading water just to keep my head above the water than to make any progress towards reaching the shore.

I just pray that I don't have a hard drive failure in the meantime, but that's crazy and pointless because I'm an atheist!

Mark, your plan looks fine. The e4200 will be able to handle all the devices without at problem. It is the high end consumer model with quite a bit of horsepower. Using switches to add more end-points is the way to go, rather than looking for an expensive router with more ports. I have three switches in my house.

As David pointed out, some USB-connected hard-drives have had a problem with the latest e4200 firmware. I am sure this will be fixed in a future firmware update, but always have your data backed up.

If you want to go with a dedicated NAS, you can buy a BYOD model and extract the disks from all your USB enclosures and use them in the NAS. Just check that they are all SATA connectors inside. I would recommend a NAS from QNAP.

For the wireless connections you want to try and place the e4200 so that the signal covers the house nicely. I have an almost-dead spot in my house, and when I move the router the dead-spot moves to somewhere else. It is very annoying in this age of smart-phones where you expect to have coverage even in the bathroom.

If you want me to stop by and help, just say the word. It's easier to spot/prevent issues on location than via a forum. :-)

Henry, thanks so much for the information and the offer but be careful.... I might take you up on it!

BYOD? Buy Your Own Drive?

I am expecting you to take me up on the offer!

Yes, BYOD = Buy/Bring Your Own Drive. Most of the QNAP devices are sold this way.

I'm really enjoying my ReadyNAS NVX. Expensive, but it's got a lot of nice features and a fairly active community building add-ons. Favorite feature so far is the TiVo archiving. It's a little rough, but it's nice to not worry about capacity any more.

I'm happy with my Synology NAS, but I didn't look in-depth at the other options. It's doing what I need it to. Still, I'll probably upgrade to one with more drive bays at some point.

Since I need to have 3-4 desktops running around the house anyway, is there ANY sense in me using an NAS rather than just throw some more shared storage into one of the existing machines?

Hmmm. Even though I almost always have my computer on when I'm home, in addition to my NAS, I still like having the NAS around as the central backup for the network and having my media ready to stream in the instances when I do power my computer down. The sharing seems like less of a headache overall, too. With the DLNA and innate transcoding, it's kept me from having to deal with a lot of software and settings work on my Windows machine. Still, there's more I could do with my NAS that I just haven't been curious enough to try yet. I could probably get even more out of it. But yeah, they can be expensive, so throwing more space into an existing machine would certainly be the cost-effective solution.