Users of HTPCs are increasingly facing the need to share the media files over the home network. However, after about a minute or two of streaming (through home network) a Blu-ray movie, you may notice that the video and audio begins to jerk.
In this article, I will share the basic information needed to play HD and Blu-ray movies smoothly from the NAS (Network Attached Storage).
After trying a network hard drive with my old Ethernet router I realized that both wireless and 100MB Ethernet felt quite sluggish especially if I wanted to work with HD video and Blu-ray files. After buying a new gigabit router (Apple AirPort Extreme), the network hard drive read and write speed felt about the same as using computer’s own internal hard drive. So, upgrading your home network to 1000MB Ethernet really makes a difference, particularly as gigabit routers are not so expensive anymore.
Make sure to connect the gigabit router with the Cat6 Network Ethernet Cable to your HTPC to make sure you will benefit from the high transfer speeds.
It is important not to use only one external hard drive to store your backups. If your backup hard drive fails, you will lose all your media collection. Thus, I recommend having at least two hard drives in RAID operation.
RAID 1 is the main setup most beginners considering buying a network hard drive should know about. RAID 1 writes, or mirrors, data to multiple disks, so you will have multiple hard drives with the exactly same data. This way if one hard drive fails, you still have another copy. Buying two or more hard drives can feel a little costly, but remember that losing your data will be extremely costly.
I use Synology Disk Station Network Attached Storage with 2 x 1TB hard drives inside. If you have a Mac, you can also use Synology as a Time Machine. Synology also provides a good backup software for Windows. Synology is quite expensive and might feel difficult to use for networking beginners, but it offers excellent throughput speed and nearly all the features you could ever need from a network hard drive. To my experience this is clearly the best HTPC hard drive due to its functionality and appearance.
One simple, but important feature that many external hard drives do not have is that Synology shuts down the hard drives after certain time of inactivity. Then it automatically turns hard drives on if you search any data from the hard drive. Lacking this functionality can be very annoying with external hard drives as you need separately turn them on when you need to access data.
Synology has also made mapping a hard drive very easy on Windows machines with their Synology Assistant. This is particularly useful for beginners who do not know how to map network drives in Windows.
So in summary, I recommend getting a gigabit router and and a NAS server with a RAID 1 mirroring functionality to share media files across the home network while ensuring that everything is safely backed up.
If you are interested in Synology DS211J featured in this article, you can find it at Amazon.com