What kind of router would you suggest?
I am on a 60mb charter connection fyi! Would I benefit from a better router? If so ... how much so?
If you are going to get a new router at the new place, at least get dual band wireless N 600 (300 + 300) or better. It all depends on what wireless devices you have. If all of your devices work with AC, it might be worth the upgrade.
On the hardwired side just make sure that it has a few Gig lan ports on the back. You will probably see them marked as 10/100/1000.
If you want network storage without a dedicated storage server, some routers will have a USB port on the back that can handle a standard USB external drive. It'll share it on the network, and you don't need to have any software to get it working.
I have my external now hooked up via esata to my desktop. Maxing out at 12mb/s now.
And yes I just realized I am maxing out my connection. Task manager is showing 98+mb being used
eSATA should yield better transfer rates than your WiFi. I would think that you would be closer to what you would see if the drive was hooked up to an internal SATA port.
Can you test the drive with crystal disk benchmark on eSATA and on USB and show us the results?
Task manager shows +98mb of what being used?
And the idea of this nas was so eventually I could upgrade the desktop and laptops drives to ssd and not have a need for a large amount of storage. And keep the large files on the network.
Fyi: this is my first NAS purchase. The WD desktop app and mobile apps are def lacking. Desktop app freezes and stops after large transfers. Then I have to delete that transfer and start over. So I have just been transferring via network mapping.
I would only use it for storing things that don't require low access times to run properly. There is a big different between accessing files from your d:\ in your local system and E:\ over the network. It would probably be best to have an SSD for your OS, HDD for mass storage, and a network HDD for things you want to share between systems on the network.
The mobile app (iPhone) won't upload all of my photos at once. I have to manually select a few photos to upload. Then repeat the process. That and it doesn't remember what photos have been loaded on the drive. So the possibility of duplicates is great.
I know a nas like this is rare/doesn't exist. Just wish it did.
Hopefully WD will get with the game and throw some major updates out soon. If not I will be ditching the nas idea.
Working with iPhones is kind of a pain. You could move the photos to your desktop, then transfer them over to the network drive if you are concerned about duplicates.
When you get into higher end storage systems you can eliminate duplications with a process called deduplication. More info on what it does here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_deduplication
As I understand it, it only holds one copy of the data and makes a pointer in all of the other locations where the same file is uploaded. think of it like a shortcut that knows where the real data is. This process is pretty taxing on the hardware so you really only see it on freeNAS boxes that have been built for it, or other more professional systems.
It won't prevent you from adding multiple copies to a NAS, but it will notice that it already has the data and makes a pointer to the original data rather than storing a second copy.
