Andy Ramblings

Warning, this is Geekdom!

I've been pondering on this for the past few weeks, how can I make my backups faster onto my NAS drive (Network Attached Storage), I've had one that runs at a normal office LAN speed of 100Mbps. This is fine if you copying files or opening files from a NAS drive, it's when you want to do a big 150GB backup, that this just takes hours! I, for one, am not a great person for waiting for things to happen, well, OK, only in computers, I like things to, you know, happen.

So, I checked the specs of my PC, and noted that it's able to go at 1000Mbps, ie 10 times faster than the current normal LAN speed. An idea forms in my wee brain, If, I can have a network that runs at 1000Mbps then doing these backups should be a hell of a lot faster. Now I needed to check what I would need, so formed my shopping list.

• 3 x cat6 cable
• 1X Gigabit hub
• 1x NAS drive

The cabling is important, OK, I got CAT6 I could have using CAT5e, but better have top notch cable, and have future speed potential of 10Gbps. Always better to have more than less in this case.

Next, the hub, yes, for your gigabit lan, you can't use your normal ADSL router as that only runs at 100Mbps not matter what you try and do, it just won't run at 1000Mbps. I got the Netgear GS605 (info on hub here and you can buy it here.) pretty cheap and well, very easy to setup, just plug it in, power it up and off you go. OK, you need to get that old cable that was connected to your PC, from the ADSL router and put that into the Netgear GS605, otherwise, you won't have access to the internet!

And finally, you need the NAS drive. There are a lot out there but a few that are good. I checked out the following:

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I recall, over 10 years ago, yep, It was a haze of the 90's but I do recall, buying my first hard disk drive, it was, at the time a huge, it was 40Mb! Yep, that was huge in those days. You could have DOS 6 or windows 3.11 , see, told you it was a haze, it was at least 12 years ago or maybe more!
Nowadays, a 40GB, that's 1000 times bigger, may just be big enough for an office laptop with nothing extra added, by extras, I mean anything other than an office application, maybe Firefox browser, you are using that and not that Internet Explorer 7 excuse of a browser? Anyway, 40GB ain't going to get you far and in no short time will you be looking to get a bigger one. As for home PC's well they now come standard with over 200GB, you know, the multimedia PC's, with a TV on board, allows you to use your PC as recorder. You get the idea.
Well, now we have moved on to the next mile stone, say welcome to the Terabyte harddisk drive! Yep,that's the next step. Want to see what it looks like? yep, that's it below... exxxxciting!