Looking for some advice in setting up the home network. I had what I thought was a solution in the Netgear WNDR4720 but it turns out it doesn't provide any modem facility.
The house has 4 PCs, 1 Tablet, 2 games machines and 2 tethered? Mobile devices.
I currently have Sky broadband (8Mb) with the "free" Sagem modem/router.
I want to get rid of the Sky modem because it's not powerful enough to reach the whole house and it keeps dropping the Internet connection.
I want to have the following set up.
One central storage device to hold all movies (200), music (800 CDs) and photos (2,000 hi res).
Ability to share the printer across all devices without going through the PC that it's currently connected to
Modem/router to allow all devices to connect to Internet
Automatic backup of media drive (is that RAID 1?)
Needs to be capable of streaming HD to multiple devices throughout the house which is a 4 bed semi.
Needs to be capable of of coping with the demands of online gaming
It would be nice if there is some sort of cloud storage but this is not a must have.
I would also like a one box solution if possible although 2 boxes will suffice.
Other considerations
It will likely be on display as space is at a premium in the room i intend to locate it in so shouldn't look like a bag of shite.
Reliability of drives
Wifi speed and range (as per above spec bearing in mind it might have to serve 4 devices simultaneously)
Eventually will also use a Sonos to access the music on the NAS
Budget £375max
Can someone suggest a setup that can achieve the above?
As you mention streaming HD I assume that your 200 movies will be / include Blu-rays. Have a think what format you want to store these in. I've ripped my 400-ish DVDs and BRs as iso files so its just like playing the disc over the network (menus, extras etc) and a DVD takes about 7GB and a BR up to 50GB.
I also have 7 Sonos zones of various types (great bits of kit!) and have opted to stream all my CDs (I guess 400/500) as Lossless so they sound their best. This takes about 300-400MB of storage each CD.
My storage also holds all our digital photos and various other bits and pieces.
All this storage adds up. I'm currently using about 8 or 9TB of my 12TB of space so I have some future proofing of space. The last thing I would want is to loose all of this (mainly the photos, the music and movies I could rip again... Wouldn't be fun and would take me a couple of months, I guess, but I could) so also have a backup (which soon will be of all of my content)
You need to work out what formats you want to store things in, how much space that will take, how much future space you want, and what level of risk you're willing to accept regarding data loss. This will dictate what your storage solution will look like and how much it will cost. £375 could soon disappear though depending on your requirements :-/
As others have said I'm not sure about streaming HD to 4 devices over wireless. I'd recommend some kind of wired solution if that is your goal (home plugs would be least disruptive)
Not sure that's helped much as I haven't suggested any solutions, however, hopefully it's given you a bit more info on the types of questions you'll need to think about.
Si