help needed with home network setup

[suman007]

Dear visitors and geniuses,

I am Suman from Basel, Switzerland. I am a biologist with very less knowledge about computers or networking. However, being an enthusiast I scan through new technologies and try to learn the advantages and disadvantages.

I have a very minimal home-network setup right now with internet connection (500 Mbps download, 50 Mbps upload), UPC cablecom modem/Router (Hard disk memory: 500 GB, SmartCard: No (virtual smart card), Number of tuners: 6 (4 for parallel recordings), DOCSIS module: Puma 5, WiFi: 802.11 a / b / g / n, Frequency: 2.4 GHz and 5.0 GHz (parallel operation)). Sony Bluray player and smart LG TV are hooked to the router/modem through Ethernet cable. Since the router/Modem is also an access for the tv channels, it is connected to the TV with HDMI. Also the blue ray is connected to the tv via HDMI.

I have a large multimedia library currently on an external hard drive and I attach it to the TV via USB, whenever I want to see any movie or listen to songs.

I would like to improve my home network to be able to watch high definition movies, play songs, regular backup, photos etc. I would like to have high speed (highest possible) home network to enjoy my library which includes blueray rips as well. Also I would setup plex for streaming media with transcoding on at least 2-3 devices in parallel. I should mention at this point that I am willing to put the required finances to get the best setup available.

I just ordered QNAP TVS-871T-i7-16G: Quad-core Intel® Core™ i7-4790S 3.2GHz to store my media and use it as a plex server. Since I do not have enough Ethernet ports in the router, I am considering to buy a switch or new router. QNAP NAS has 2x 2 x 10 Gigabit Ethernet port which I would like to use for the traffic.

I plan to connect the network switch with the router, the NAS and the TV with the switch. I would try to do link integration for fail safe and high speed.

Can anyone please help me find out if this is a viable thought ? If this will help me increase the traffic between the NAS and the TV through plex ? Any recommended hardware or setup to improve the performance would be highly appreciated.

Many thanks,
Suman

 

[jsmithepa]

As long as your place is wired for gigabit ethernet, you are good to go. WIFI ain't gonna cut it.

 

[marko55]

For a solid HD stream you should only need about 1.5Mbps, so wifi is not an issue as its not really that heavy. You just want a strong wifi router that can handle processing the traffic for multiple wifi clients simultaneously. I'd definitely invest in some strong wifi adapters and a wifi router/AP with AC and multiple spatial streams/MIMO. Sounds like you're prepared to invest, so maybe an ASUS RT-AC5300.

Not sure how many disks, what kind of disks, and what kind of RAID setup you're using in it but consider how fast data can even get off the array and on to the wire before worrying about using two 10Gbps adapters teamed. Remember, a single 10Gbps network adapter can move 1250MB/s on your LAN. If you put 8 FAST HDDs in your QNAP, in a RAID-0, you're looking at 1600MB/s coming off that array and that's only with basically no data on the disks. As the disks start to fill up you can count on that dropping to (or below) 1000MB/s. Chances are you're going to configure some level of redundant RAID in that thing so every time you "sacrifice" a drive to parity (RAID 5 or 6) or mirroring (RAID 10) that overall potential of data throughput to the wire goes down. You're also only as fast as your slowest point in path so even if you're 10Gbps out of the QNAP, doesn't sounds like any of your clients will be able to saturate that, unless you've got 10 of them ALL pulling a massive sequential file(s) off simultaneously.