Help me design new home network

BazEP

BazEP

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Chris
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Hi all
I'm after a bit of help in sorting out my home network. At the moment I have two broadband lines connect to a home hub and a BT voyager wireless router, a 1tb nas attached to the BT voyager, an old desktop PC connected to the BT voyager and then a couple of work lappys connecting wirelessly to either the home hub or the voyager. I then have a few non-networked tv's, one with a sky hd box and another with a wii. I'm going to get a new MacBook pro and thunderbolt screen to replace the desktop and I'm wondering what the best set up would be. Part of the plan is to digitise all our DVDs etc to have everything available everywhere in the house. I'm thinking I might need to upgrade a couple of other elements such as routers and maybe add some other bits like apple tv. Is apple the best route to go? I'm also planning to get the mrs an iPad so we seem to be slowly moving over to apple.

Any advice as to the best approach to take and this to consider? What size of storage would you recommend and in what configuration for digitising everything?

Many thanks.
 
Are you sure you have 2 broadband lines?

Start with the basics. Anything that can be wired together should be - even with wireless N technology, you won't get the speed of a wired connection. Wired should also be gigabit. I'm not sure if the home hub is gigabit, but I'd either replace the home hub with a decent ADSL router or add a separate switch/router to isolate the device that does the internet connection from the rest of the network (ISP supplied routers are notoriously bad).

What's your budget and what do you want to get from it? A 1TB NAS isn't going to hold that much media for example....
 
pretty much what andy said, at least everything on the backbone of the network (switches, routers, NAS etc) should be cabled with gigabit (gigabit to the router isnt 100% necessary if youre running everything from a switch). even computers where possible, or at least have the option to run wired over wireless.

im also puzzled a bit about 2 broadband lines.
 
as stated you would struggle with true HD video over wifi, if you can wire everything together with CAT5 cable or at least power line adaptors that would be the way forward. When we moved into our current house i cat5 cabled the house and ran windows media centre for a while but found i never really used it. You can go the apple route if you want but then you are locked in the the Eco system personally I hate iTunes with a passion it's an awful bit of software but they do have the apple TV for linking to your tv.
 
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it is just about possible, my WDTV is wireless and plays back 1080 content with the smallest of judders (i get quiet anal about things like that, i doubt any normal person would notice :D).
 
Thanks guys, we're planning to move house probably a couple of times in the next few years so cat5ing everything isn't an option. How much storage do you reckon I'll need and where do you think I should use the existing nas (is it worth using the existing nas for non movie files and have a new nas (2tb?) for movies?

The 2 bb lines aren't really important in the equation I guess, only that they come in to different parts of the house.
 
powerline adapters may be an idea then. do the 2 BB beed to be on the same network?

doesnt really matter what NAS is used for movies. but cabling would make for better bandwidth.
 
BazEP said:
How much storage do you reckon I'll need
Click to expand...

Depends how you're storing the movies. Personally, I recode to the following:

  • DVDs (don't get these any more): 1.5G/movie
  • Most BluRays - resampled to 720p and 4-6G/movie
  • Some BluRays kept at 1080p: 8+G/movie
  • HDTV records about 1G/hr.

Figure out how many of each you want to store and then size accordingly. Also, you need to think about backups. If everything is on a single disk and it dies, how much is it worth to recreate the files?

As Neil will repeat: RAID isn't a backup.... you want 2 copies of data in separate boxes if possible.

If you're tight like me, you'll put all the fairly easily recreatable media on a RAID5 style array so that if one disk dies, it can be resilvered. I backup my music files as they would be a right royal pain to recreate (unlike losing the video store which would probably just be a neat way of tidying the library as we tend to watch once and then not again!!).
 
Thanks again,
Bb's are separated and will remain so.
How much should I be budgeting for storage and backups for 200 DVDs (neither my music nor video collection is particularly extensive tbh) + future needs?

Powerline adapters are under consideration - what sort of device would I need at the tv end? And again what sort of budget should I be looking at (don't mind used/eBay).
 
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