Jun 17: My Gigabit project
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:
The HP Media Vault, It's not too bad. It has some useful features, like the ability to plug in a second drive, that can be setup as a Mirror drive, (Don't ever use Stripped Raid for a backup device). The downside, in my view, the software to access it, is windows only. I don't think it's accessible to non-windows based OS, ie Linux, Mac OSX, so for me, it was dropped.
Next came a QNAP a self assembly NAS drive kit, this is a pretty neat solution if have a spare 200GB harddisk and want another use for it, rather than plugging it into the PC. It has quite a list of features, a Webserver, a P2P (Bit Torrent) client, FTP, and well quite a few other features. Why didn't I get it? Cost mainly, and that I didn't require all the extra features, Mind, I think it's a very good device if your running a small business and have a good broadband connection.
Last in the list, the Buffalo Linkstation, I currently had one, so knowing a product, that I was happy with, The Linkstation Pro was on my watch list anyway. The one I had didn't have the Gigabit port, but the newer one does so, well, after a lot of dithering, the pros and cons of the other two, it was the chosen one, and surprisingly, the cheapest for a 500Gb system.
One thing that all three systems offer is that you can plug in another drive via USB ports, these can either be used to add space, or just to backup the data that is on the NAS drive. So, well you can then make up a nice Terabyte (that's 1000GB) backup system.
So, how about the performance? Well, I was impressed, I can backup 12Gb work of MP3 in about 18mins, this takes over 1hr on my old NAS drive. So showing good results. I use ACRONIS true image to backup all my data. These backups used to take over 6hrs, now only take 4hrs. The last challenge was to see if I can run an applications from it.
I use a software called VMware workstation to test other operating systems, including Vista (Bad Bad product), but mainly Linux, anyway, Vmware make rather large files, over 10GB, depending on the size of the virtual harddisk. My vista one, for example is over 14GB. I copied the VMware folders over to the new NAS drive and ran Vmware, low and behold, the application ran at the same speed as if it was running from it's normal harddisk within my PC.
So, my over all opinion? Yep, well worth it, it does what I hoped it would and better. So, if you want a a good media centre based system, I would advise that you have a gigabit backbone around your house, and plug into it with Normal connections.
There you go, Oh you want to know how much it cost? NAS drive, £202, Netgear hub £20, and cable £10, £232! A Good deal. If you get a smaller harddisk, the cost will be slighly cheaper. All in all a good project and a success as well.
