Suggestions for Home Network

[aadeshgandhi]

Hello All,
I recently bought a Netgear N900 router which has USB slots that makes external HDD's into shared drives. This coupled with Netgear's ReadySHARE function enables me to access the files from anywhere and also grant access to friends and family. The transfer speed is choppy and hence I started to look in the personal cloud option, as test created a free account on Tonido. It was fairly easy and I could share any folder from my laptop and grant access.
I have a couple of things that I want the network to do

1) I have two external drives one is 1TB 2.0 and other one is 3TB 3.0 which I would love to use in the setup that I build.

2) Get good transfer speed while wirelessly moving data from laptop to the server and vice versa. Right now I get about 200kbps and most of the time the connection is lost. I would like to see at least 5Mbps speed over wireless. I have a Dell laptop with Intel Centrino Wireless-N 1030 card working over 2.4 GHz band.

3) I would like to have an interface so that I can access the files from anywhere and also grant access to friends and family.
While testing out Tonido my laptop (server) was connected to internet thru wi-fi and so was my friend’s, he got a speed of ~ 180kbps to download a ~65mb file. When we tried to download the same amount of data from Mediafire he got speed of ~ 550 kbps? How can I achieve download speed like for my home server?
Based on the test that I did on speedtest.net I consistently download speeds of about 18Mbps and upload speed of about 4Mbps.

Now based on my limited knowledge in this field I got to know that I can either use a spare computer to create my server, buy Synology or something similar. What would be my best and cheapest option looking at the things I want to do.

Thanks,
Aadesh Gandhi.

[aadeshgandhi]

Hello guys, any thoughts?


Aadesh.

[aadeshgandhi]

Bumping up the issue...

[thiggins]

I would not blame the NETGEAR router until you run some transfer tests using an Ethernet connection. From your "most of the time the connection is lost" comment, it sounds like you could have poor wireless connectivity, which will definitely limit your file copy performance.

Don't expect super-high speed from the Intel Centrino Wireless-N 1030 card, either. It supports 300 Mbps link rates (in 40 MHz mode) only for receive. Transmit is single-stream, which has a maximum link rate of 150 Mbps. You might try moving files to your laptop and see if the speed is different than when you move them from the laptop.

[scbison]

Are you and your friend both connected to your same wifi? I.E. your sitting next to each other testing? I haven't looked at Tonido in a bit but if I remember correctly you are creating a tunnel to a Tonido server with your laptop (server) and your friend is creating a tunnel to a Tonido Server with his laptop (Client).

I have a Western Digital External USB Drive Case (with a Seagate 600GB drive inside of it) that I was trying to use as a NAS connected on the USB port of an ASUS RTN-16. The transfer speeds from a PC with an ethernet connection directly to the router was extremely slow. I decided the Router should be a router and not try to be a NAS at the same time so I went with another option. I did leave the drive connected; however, I still had plans for it.

I setup a server (laptop like you). In my case it is a Asus EEPC 1000HD. The display died on it and it was sitting doing nothing. Now it is my cloud server I am running Linux Mint on it. Not a good server version of Linux but it was already installed from when I was using it as a laptop. I added a 500GB USB drive to it and installed owncloud http://owncloud.org. I use the internal drive for boot and I mount /var/www onto the USB drive. Thus all of my data (and the entire Apache2 web directory) is on the USB drive.

A port forward of external: 443 to the EeePC:443 brings the internet connection to the Owncloud server. I now have a cloud I can access from anywhere including sync clients for Android, Linux, Windows, and I assume iOS as well.

I just grabbed a file to test the speed and going through two VPN tunnels and also via SSL (https://) I was downloading data at 428kbps. The EeePC is connected via a 10/100 NIC into a 10/100 switch into a GB port on the Asus RT-N16 and I have a 4.2MBps upload (tested not claimed) internet connection.

The EeePC is a lowpower netbook and not very exotic hardware at all. Your laptop should likely perform better.

In addition to this I have a cronjob on the EeePC that fires off RSYNC to sync the EeePC USB drive with the USB drive that is connected to the router. This way I have redundancy instead of through a RAID through a redundant array of inexpensive USB NAS drives . I SYNC every night so a loss would be a days worth of data only and the bottleneck/slow transfer is during off hours. Acceptable for my needs.

So bottom line, if you can try something like Owncloud, run it on your laptop, and connect your laptop to a ethernet port you can then get a better read on the bandwidth you can expect.