Quick [tech] Questions Thread

[Venkman]

Thanks Trippy. I have an older box with a Hauppage device in it that I'd been cannabalizing. I'll resurrect that. If I recall the software was servicable. Came with a remote and the IR receiver on a 6' cable.

[MrHat]

Anyone have any experience with those KBM devices for Playstation?

Some RL friends of mine refuse to play Overwatch on PC and want to play it on PS4 and I don't want to struggle w/ the controller and would like to use a KBM.

Has anyone successfully used a Xim adapter or something similar?

[Sky]

Probably best just to find new friends.

[Rendakor]

Anyone have any experience with those KBM devices for Playstation?

Some RL friends of mine refuse to play Overwatch on PC and want to play it on PS4 and I don't want to struggle w/ the controller and would like to use a KBM.

Has anyone successfully used a Xim adapter or something similar?

I used a CronusMax for a while to play Destiny; it was alright but not great. Kind of a pain in the ass to set up, and you need your PC right next to your PS4.

[schild]

Kind of a ridiculous question: has anyone seen anything about NAS made to shove SSDs into them. So you know, smaller, quieter, etc
 Gonna need at least a good Nas if not a full server for the house.

Boyo I know nothing about servers.

[Trippy]

Yes there are but you probably don't want one.

https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS416slim#overview

That thing only has 4 bays so the amount you can store is minimal. Also the performance is not SSD speed cause Gigabit Ethernet. You can stick 2.5" SSDs in NASes with standard 3.5" bays with adapter sleds. If your NAS is mostly idle or out of the way the reduced noise benefit is minimal to nonexistent.

How much are you trying to store?

[MahrinSkel]

You can stick SATA SSD's into anything that uses SATA interfaces, which includes nearly every NAS, but as Trippy pointed out you're limited to about 100 MB/sec by the NIC (60 MB/sec on AC wireless) and you can approach that with a 4-bay RAID on normal platters. Since you can stick the NAS literally anywhere you can get power to it (using wireless if needed), noise, power draw, and heat is rarely a major consideration.

There aren't many applications for NAS that need faster rather than big and cheap, so not many people have SSD's in their NAS.

--Dave

[schild]

Honestly this was just a case of wanting a small a NAS as possible. Right now I'm erring towards one of the QNAP i5s or i7s so I can offload Plex duty to the NAS. But honestly, I know so little about which harddrives are worthwhile these days that I'd just be throwing shit at the wall to see what stuck. If I went for regular HDDs, I'd probably do 16-32TB. It would be the media center / storage for the entire house.

Actually, at this moment, I'm deciding whether or not I want a ridiculous box in a closet and have multiple terminal setups in the house rather than just a desk in one place. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Trippy]

Get the 5400 RPM Western Digital Reds of the appropriate size.

If you want 32 TB you won't be able to get that in a 4-bay NAS unless you don't want any redundancy. RAID 5 in a 4-bay with 8 TB drives will net you 24 TB.

[schild]

Stability wise - which is what I really care about end of the day. What about this: http://www.amazon.com/QNAP-TVS-671-i5-8G-US-6-Bay-3-0GHz-10G-ready/dp/B00S0XRY2G

In Raid 10 with 6TB Red Drives (yielding, I believe 18TB). I don't know how any of the raid systems work btw, never actually bothered with it. Just cursory glances at pros and cons.

[Trippy]

Yes a 6-bay NAS with 6 TB drives will net you 18 TB in RAID 1 or RAID 10 mode.

You don't need a powerful CPU to just serve media. You do need it if you want do things like transcoding or fast encryption/decryption (assuming it doesn't have a dedicated hardware encryption chip) on the NAS itself.

[schild]

I don't think I'm wrong, but I do believe if I'm running Plex on it, I need the transcoding. Almost all my files are 1080p+ at this point.

[MahrinSkel]

The only benefit of CPU on a NAS is transcoding when serving media (when the source file isn't compatible with the destination device) and a full-up Intel CPU is overkill for that purpose. If you want to jump to the high end like that, the Synology 1815+ is an 8-bay that can be upgraded to 18 bays, allowing a truly ridiculous maximum capacity of 108TB (54 in RAID or Synology's own mirroring/striping architecture). Or the 2415+ is about the same price as that QNap, but with 12 bays (upgradeable to 24). Either one should handle transcoding.

And of course, you can always start tacking on USB 3.0 enclosures for even more capacity, but that loses you the single-volume benefits. You lose the 10G NIC (both Synology have 4x1G ports), but since streaming 4K video only needs 15Mbps (bits, not Bytes) that's not a real issue.

--Dave

Edit: And the Synology have hardware encryption, if that's a concern. If you really want the raw horsepower, and cost isn't a factor, then you might as well just get a full tower server,  fill it with PCIe SSD's, and some ridiculous server GPGPU architecture with 1080 GTX cards running on CUDA.

[Chimpy]

RAID 5 in a 4-bay with 8 TB drives will net you 24 TB.

RAID 5 on drives that big is so likely to have a second disk fail during rebuild that it is almost as if you didn't use any type of disk redundancy at all. Rebuild times are astronomical even with higher speed disks.

And if you are trying to get 20+ TB of storage with some form of resiliency for a disk failure, buying a tower server that has enough drive bays and a decent RAID adapter with a good cache battery will probably be cheaper than a NAS.

[Trippy]

It might be cheaper but it's also a huge amount of work. I've built two "file server" towers. One is an unRAID server and the other was going to be Windows Home Server until they removed Drive Extender and became a regular Windows Home box with a lot of network shares. While it was educational specing and sourcing the parts and setting up and configuring both it took a lot time and the servers themselves are incredibly bulky and heavy and difficult to move. My current active setup using Synology and QNAP NASes, while it doesn't currently store as much as those tower servers, it much nicer to live with than the towers.

Edit: and

[schild]

Right now my other option is to just buy a goddamn server from Dell or something. But I know NOTHING about current server tech. I've allotted $2000-$3000 for this build including drives.

i_have_no_idea_what_im_doing.gif

[Chimpy]

I didn't mean to imply it would be easy but wanting 20-30 TB of storage while being protected from a drive failure is always going to be both expensive and not entirely simple to setup correctly.

EDIT: If that is your budget, something like the QNAP you linked is probably your best bet. Definitely go with RAID 1 or 10 if you are using that big of drives.

[schild]

You'd think it would be simple and easy to setup, because you know, it's 2016 and file sizes are getting massive. I expect I'll be waiting until a Kickstarter changes the way I think about immersion circulators network attached storage.

[MahrinSkel]

I don't know about QNAP, but my Synology hardware setup was literally "Open case, plug in drives, close case, power on and wait for it to finish formatting." Took about 15 seconds to run through the basic setup after that, and Plex took longer to download than to set up.

Synology has a pretty turnkey set of apps for media serving, it doesn't get complicated until you start in on using it remotely over the internet (and even that wasn't hard).

--Dave

[Trippy]

You'd think it would be simple and easy to setup, because you know, it's 2016 and file sizes are getting massive.

They are easy to setup if you buy something from a (good) NAS provider like Dave said above. However you pay a premium for that convenience.

I expect I'll be waiting until a Kickstarter changes the way I think about immersion circulators network attached storage.

The main issue is there still isn't a good platform to build upon that isn't proprietary/costly. FreeNAS probably comes closet (and is free) but it's still more of a hobbyist thing rather than a consumer-level product. Microsoft *had* a platform (though paid) with Windows Home Server and in fact you could buy WHS servers from vendors like HP that essentially did what you want to do now but they basically killed off that product by removing its one killer feature (the Drive Extender feature I mentioned above). MS is working on a bunch of "next-gen" stuff that in theory could be the basis for such a platform (again) but they've been working on it for a long time now and it still isn't finished yet and probably won't be until like 2022 before all of it ends up in the consumer version of Windows.

[schild]

boo

[Sky]

Set up the synology on my wifi router's wired lan ports and it's only getting about half the speed my wireless connections get. I forgot that about this router (ASUS RT-N12), I use wifi on my main pc even though it sits right at the router.

Any idea why the wired connections would be so much slower than wireless? Setup was about as simple as it could be for the NAS, but I got tired of waiting for the plugins to download over that connection and went to bed.

[Trippy]

How are you testing the speed? How are the drives configured in the NAS?

[Sky]

I'm just going by performance in general. My initial testing years ago was just Steam download speeds, but that's been pretty accurate across all applications.

When I set up Windows 10 (also last night), everything was downloading so pokey over ethernet I snagged the wifi adapter driver and shut off ethernet (I use a USB adapter: TP-LINK TL-WN722N). Everything was downloading normally after that.

I went to bed before getting to any configuration on the NAS. Just put the drives in, turned it on, set up the admin acc't and was downloading the default apps it wants to install.

[Trippy]

I'm still confused. As you saying your PCs are downloading slow over Ethernet or the NAS is or both?

[MahrinSkel]

Is this the router you got from the broadband provider? Because those usually suck. I built the network here around a Trendnet 'unmanaged switch' (so called because it has the internal capacity to run every port at full speed) because the supposedly gigabit ports on the router that AT&T gave me was lucky to manage a total network transfer of 100 Mbit.

One of the results was that ethernet-to-ethernet transfer rates maxed at 4 MB/sec or so, while having one on Wifi and one on ethernet more than doubled the speed. A good Archer C7 WAP and the good ethernet hub, with the AT&T router only used for the TV and internet, seriously improved the performance (enough that the cheap WD Greens are the limiting factor with 16-20 MB/sec).

The crappy stuff they give out for broadband service is adequate for connecting all your household devices to the internet. If you are trying to connect devices to each other (for example, streaming from your NAS), they suck balls.

--Dave (and not in a fun way)

[Sky]

Is this the router you got from the broadband provider?

Oh hell no. I don't use their cable 'modem', either.

So far I'm just talking WAN to LAN speeds, so far the NAS still isn't up and running for LAN to LAN.

[Trippy]

Are you sure that's a Gigabit Ethernet port? It sounds like you've connected to a Fast Ethernet port. What's the brand and model number of that AT&T router?

[MahrinSkel]

He said above:

https://www.asus.com/Networking/RTN12/

Specs say that it has 10/100 ports, and it's probably short on actual switching capacity.

--Dave

[Sky]

Wouldn't 100Mbps ethernet still be faster at downloads than wifi, when I'm only talking about one device on router?

[MahrinSkel]

Not in this case, even theoretically, your router has 300 Mbps capacity on the wireless (dual band N) and only 100 on the ethernet. And that's ignoring switching capacity, many cheap switches and routers don't have enough switching to run more than one port, in one direction, at full capacity (where my 16-port 'unmanaged switch' has 32 Gbps internal switching capacity, enough to serve every port at max in both directions).

In essence, your router is a decent consumer WAP with gateway routing and ethernet switching tacked on, in that order of priorities. The ethernet ports are an afterthought, adequate for a printer but not ready for serious intra-network demands.

--Dave

Edit: My Archer C7 has an absolute Wifi bandwidth of 1750 Mbps, and in theory could overwhelm the gigabit capacity of the connection to the switch. But since my limiting factor is usually my cheap NAS hard drives or the broadband, and not that connection, I don't worry about it.

[schild]

Neither here nor there, but I have never once seen a wifi signal max out it's speed or anywhere near it even under ideal circumstances with no known bottleneck.

[Sky]

Another pita: my copy of Windows 7 is an upgrade of Windows XP back when you could get 7 for $50. I only have the key for retail XP (the original key). This will not activate Windows 10. Windows 7 only gives me a 'Product ID' and the key is encrypted in the registry.

I am hesitant to pay $119 for Windows 10 only to have it give me problems when I upgrade my mobo/cpu/ram (the next candidate on the upgrade cycle).

I guess I could nuke this SSD install, go back to 7 on the hdd, upgrade that to Win 10 and clone it to the SSD? Sounds like a few possible points of failure as well as ending up with a nice new install of W10 with a ton of old registry crap and 5 years of accumulated file crap (which is why I wanted the clean install!).

[MahrinSkel]

Neither here nor there, but I have never once seen a wifi signal max out it's speed or anywhere near it even under ideal circumstances with no known bottleneck.

I have gotten real transfer speeds of 45 MB/sec on a nominal 650 Mbps AC wireless connection from my laptop. That's the closest I've ever gotten to topping out the system, and since it was just about the write speed of the system I was transferring into (the source was the SSD on my laptop), I don't know where the bottleneck ultimately was. My general rule of thumb has been that Wifi is good for half of whatever it said the connection speed was.

I suspect that his real switching capacity on the ethernet is significantly short of even the nominal speed, by what he's describing. I overbuilt for what is ultimately just a residential network, but he's close to the other extreme. As soon as he gets outside of the normal consumer profile, the shortcomings choke his performance.

--Dave

Fake edit: Can't help on the W10 stuff, I haven't actually bitten the bullet on that myself.

[schild]

Another pita: my copy of Windows 7 is an upgrade of Windows XP back when you could get 7 for $50. I only have the key for retail XP (the original key). This will not activate Windows 10. Windows 7 only gives me a 'Product ID' and the key is encrypted in the registry.

I am hesitant to pay $119 for Windows 10 only to have it give me problems when I upgrade my mobo/cpu/ram (the next candidate on the upgrade cycle).

I guess I could nuke this SSD install, go back to 7 on the hdd, upgrade that to Win 10 and clone it to the SSD? Sounds like a few possible points of failure as well as ending up with a nice new install of W10 with a ton of old registry crap and 5 years of accumulated file crap (which is why I wanted the clean install!).

Just buy Windows 10. Or post in Useless Conversation asking if anybody has a copy or can get a cheap one from Digital River.