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Media Server / Home Network

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aod

New Around Here
I have recently moved house and am in the process of setting up a home network which I would like to make the most of.

Background
My new house (bungalow) has been re-developed to include LAN ports in various rooms, which all terminate in the loft where I have installed my router. This provides 2 benefits – 1) Good spread of WiFi coverage in all rooms, 2) Direct gigabit connections for various devices (PVR / NAS / PC etc).

I have the following equipment as part of the set up:

  • TP-Link TL-WR1043ND Wireless N Gigabit Router
  • Humax HDR-FOX T2 500GB Freeview PVR
  • Zyxel NSA325 NAS
  • Windows 7 PC and Laptop
  • Android tablet and phone
  • Chomecast (HDMI TV dongle)
  • Plex Media Server (NAS)

The 4 gigabit LAN connections provide internet access to the Humax PVR (for catch up TV / smart TV emulation), NAS box for local backups, PC LAN connection, 1 spare connection for Ad-Hoc use.

The main purpose of the NAS is to provide backups for the PC, which contains all of my media / data on a dedicated drive. However this only scratches at the surface of what is can do, however until I can invest in bigger drives (currently 2x2TB RAID 1), this will remain primarily as a backup device. I partly use it as a media server, but looking to transfer this function to another device (see below).

Windows 7 PC
This is the primary workstation that I use daily, and caters for everything from general web surfing to gaming and multimedia / web development.
This PC holds my media library which along with non-media data gets backed up to the NAS daily via EaseUS ToDo Backup.

Media server
My ultimate setup would be to have all of my media (music / videos / photo library etc) hosted on my NAS, and then be able to access these libraries via my Android tablet (using Plex) and stream playlists etc to the TV via Chromecast. However as explained I am having to move away from this as my NAS regularly gets low on disk space for backups.

I have been thinking about taking advantage of the USB feature on my TP-Link router, whereby I can copy my media libraries to an external USB drive, plug this in to the router and use this (possibly) with Plex (or similar) to stream to the TV. This would likely be an interim solution until I can upgrade my NAS WD Red drives to a larger capacity, and use the NAS as a media server (via Plex MS).

Conclusion
Effectively I want to be able to automate backups of my primary data (sort of works with ToDo Backup to my NAS), host media in a personal cloud, be able to stream this to TV’s / wireless devices controlled via android tablet (as well as things like YouTube and desktop sharing etc).

I think I’ve got most of the tools to do this, but just want to see if I’m making any glaring mistakes / missing anything that can do this better.

Any suggestions or comments welcome.
 
all backups should be made using wired because it is more reliable and much faster. It is preferable to have 2 NAS for backups should one fail while you are restoring a RAID array or while backing up. It doesnt necessarily have to be dedicated NAS, it can even be 2 seperate drives attached to the network.

The tp-link cannot share files, it does not use SAMBA. It only lets one client access a usb connected device at a time by allowing it to access the hardware over networking. If it did have SAMBA than it would be very slow. I have used the first tp-link 1043nd which had a 400Mhz MIPS and it did 2MB/s of SAMBA using openwrt. So even if the new variant did have a 800Mhz dual core MIPS (im just guessing) than it would only do 8MB/s of SAMBA. Best to leave the usb port on tp-link unused.

One thing i dont get is many who have big houses still use tp-links when there are much better options available.
 

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