NAS question

[metzy85]

ok hear is my problem. i have a western digital 250gb my book and a 120 gb passport hard drive. My 250gb keeps breaking and i think it has something todo with the fact that i use it with my laptop and have to plug it in and unplug everytime i want to use it. So i got the idea i have this OLD computer a 466mhz celeron and 192mb of ram and a 8gb hard drive all working fin got old mother board and plugged it all in put to ethernet cards in and bridged them. plugged the 250gb hard drive in for lil test got everything shareing (xp pro by the way). It worked fine watching vids off of it when i was close and my wifi was strong but when i got down to two bars left on my wifi the vids would get a bit stuttery. Wut i want to know is are there any better NAS ideas from wut u see hear. Not very good with linux thats y i did not use it on the NAS box. I want to know of any way to make it faster or to have a better running system please help. Thanks!

 

[tipstir]

Just to let you know off the bat, you can change the 8GB HD in the laptop to 40GB HDD 7200 rpm or higher. It will work if you update the BIOS. NAS you can buy a kit for $59.99 off Amazon and stick in any HDD you want IDE and make that a NAS drive. It has NIC 10/100 and Web Manager. Format, set IP etc.. Those My book stuff are just USB HDD you still need to share them from a PC like you're doing. Slower if you don't use Firewire though.. NAS Network Attached Storage is better as it doesn't need to be attached to any PC as it can run independent on it's own.

 

[metzy85]

my laptop has 60 gb hard drive. thats not the nas comp is. its another seperate comp. is there any way of doing this without spending money or def not 60 bucks

 

[tipstir]

my laptop has 60 gb hard drive. thats not the nas comp is. its another seperate comp. is there any way of doing this without spending money or def not 60 bucks

You can do it for free, but you'll need a PC that you can give up to Unix NAS.. Add HDDs to that and you'll be set after you try using Free NAS. (100% free)

http://www.freenas.org/

ScreenShot
http://www.freenas.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=15&Itemid=28

Another one I had use was called ClarkConnect uses Samba Linux to create a NAS drive. I must say it was really quick and you can access the drive under Windows. You can setup aliases folders and etc.. ex. \\dshare\docs

 

[Nodsu]

Uhm.. Why the bridging? Maybe explain a bit more what is connected to what..

The wireless is 54Mbit, right?

From your description it's pretty obvious that wifi is the bottleneck here. Try moving the access point or antennas to get better coverage or try tuning some wireless parameters in the AP setup.

 

[tipstir]

Shouldn't matter if the NAS is wired or wireless...

 

[DelJo63]

except poor thruput. heavy usage will drown the WiFi and under stress,
some links seem to be prone to disconnections -- ugly for data integrity

 

[metzy85]

I bridged the connection for hopes of getting the most bandwidth and the wifi is only 54 mb gonna try ur free nas today have alot of time i will tell u how if works out


ok so i got it working pretty good gonna test it out get to u of how i think it is thanks alot guys