Monday, October 29, 2012

State of My Home LAN

Things settled here.  NAS4free proved to be fabulous.  Stable.  With regular updates steadily improving on visible cosmetics which gives me confidence in behind the scene work. Very convenient for use.  Therefore it is not surprising that I ran out space on the main pool I use to store video files.  I also need to add new storage to NAS and migrate photos and Lightroom catalog there.  My NAS box found its permanent place on a network shelf in the laundry room.  I love the case and the 3- and 4-drive racks are very convenient.  And, yes, they look just cool.
HTPC got a passive CPU cooler and the HD rack was removed to free space for it.  HTPC is still noisy though - 7k rpm HD and power supply can be easily heard.  But when music or movies are played it does not matter.  I doubt I will ever install SSD in this HTPC, if only to cut on noise.  Can I even migrate the existing Windows 7 install to SSD?  I remember reading that this NVidia disk controller does not handle SSD well.  I suspect the main culprit is power supply fan anyway.

Running inSSIDer shows how busy the WiFi 2.4GHz band is.  There is a total of 64 access points available for WiFi clients in my living room.  I had to change the channel to avoid overlap with the most powerful neighbor.








I also got myself a refurbished Cisco WAP610NRM and set it up on an unused channel in 5GHz band. Just to off-load iPhone5 and office laptop traffic.

Windows shows the 960-5 connection as having about 100Mbps speed.  I wonder what would it take to increase this connection speed....
EDIT: Changing the channel width from 20 to 40MHz more than doubled the speed!
Posted by Notes to Self at 4:48 PM

4 comments:

  1. UnknownNovember 12, 2012 at 7:36 PM

    Did you ever do performance testing between OpenIndiana and Nas4Free? I'm currently running OI but considering moving my pool to N4F because of all the extra services... on my test install it does seem like N4F is lacking some automated setup that Napp-It does (like scrubbing, ability to create snapshots that run every 5 minutes)...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Notes to SelfNovember 12, 2012 at 8:59 PM

    Never did much of performance testing with OI. From what I remember I failed to find ways to do SMART HD monitoring through GUI. Overall with OI I felt I had no insight into hardware, such as temperatures, CPU clock speed etc. nas4free met my expectations out of the box.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousMarch 19, 2013 at 10:50 AM

    I came across your blog and could not stop myself from reading it all :) Thank you for taking the time to share your experience.

    I am experimenting with Napp-It running on OmniOS these days and can confirm it shows SMART info in my setup, which is currently:

    All-in-One (ESXi 5.1 with OmniOS+Napp-it Virtual Machine)
    ST3250410AS disk accessible by VM via RDM
    It's currently connected to on-board controller of GA-B75M-D3H motherboard.

    Hope that helps.

    P.S.
    I am waiting for Dell SAS 6i/R controllers to arrive so I can use pass-through instead of RDM. Let me know if you want to get update when I put this system together.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Notes to SelfMarch 19, 2013 at 1:09 PM

    Thanks, Zeuzeu!
    I am confident the update will be appreciated by the Internet. Use the blogspot!

    Cheers!

    ReplyDelete

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