I'm looking to add a drive to my R7500 in order to allow everyone in the household to access movies and music from one central drive.
I have added a USB3 HDD onto my R7500, but sometimes the files are slow to load and I get issues with buffering. So i'm looking for alternatives.
I have 2 options but am not sure which might be the fastest. I have a HDD which has an ethernet connection, so I could connect this to a LAN port on the R7500 and access it that way. Or I have an old 512Gb SSD from an Apple Macbook Pro, which I can put into a caddy and connect via one of the USB3 ports on the R7500.
Does anyone know which might be the fastest when it comes to connectivity?
I'm guessing that USB3 might be the better way after looking at a number of posts on the web about this, however I wondered if anyone has already come up with this situation and looked into it further on the R7500? (or any Netgear router with Readyshare).
How long is a piece of string?
You're probably wondering what that has to do with your question - simple - the answers are the same - it depends...
How fast (or slow) your ReadyShare connection will be will depend on what the router is doing at the time; how fast (or slow) your HDD with an Ethernet connection will be will depend on the drive itself.
My suggestion is if you're serious about storage and it's performance, is that you forget about ReadyShare and buy yourself a decent NAS - you can research the NAS features & performance before purchase at places like Small Network Builder.
Be sure that your NAS has provision for backing up your data (preferably to a directly attached USB or eSATA drive) and be aware that RAID is not a form of backup.
Give a man a fish, feed him for a day Teach a man to fish, feed him for life.
thanks for the reply, i've thought about a NAS, however my back-ups are already done via an Apple Time Machine, so the NAS would only purely be to hold media - seems an overkill doesn't it?
Forgive my ignorance here, but whats the benefits of a NAS over an Ethernet attached HDD? I have a 1Tb Corsair Voyager Air HDD which has an Ethernet connection, so if I connected that i'd have thought that would be the same?
I guess at the end of the day my main priority here is speed. If I can get a drive attached to the network thats fast enough, then its a perfect media solution. I already have a few western digital 'MyBookLive' drives attached and I can stream from these, should I stay with that as a solution instead of attaching anything to the R7500 and just move my media to one of these drives instead?
My first question would have to be what exactly is an ethernet attached HDD - ethernet is a network medium, it allows data conforming to the IEEE802.3 specifications to be transferred over it, however, you cannot connect to most hard disk drives using IEEE802.3 - so that ethernet attached HDD has to be more than just an HDD - it has to have a controller of some sort that allows the data to be passed from your computer to the disk and this will be done using one or more file transfer protocols - most likely SMB or CIFS, which is not the most efficient ways to transfer data..
At the end of it all - your ethernet attached HDD is most likely a NAS of some sort, so the answer to your question becomes a comparison of the features of one NAS to another.
Now - lets talk about your back-ups and that apple time machine - how many WD "MyBookLive" units do you have, and does your time machine also back those up?
Give a man a fish, feed him for a day Teach a man to fish, feed him for life.
ok, the Time Machine only backs up the Macbook Pros, no WD network drives. The network drives are only there at the moment to store things like work documents, etc. The sorts of things I need to get remotely.
The Corsair Voyager Air HDD is a wizzy bit of kit, it is an HDD with a built in battery and wireless functionality which allows you to connect to it and use it stand alone - I take it in the car and the kids connect to it and watch movies/ tv shows - cool! It also has network connectivity, so hence the ethernet connection. I guess it probably is a bit similar to a NAS.
Yes thats correct. These drives only act as a place to put old documents and files. I normally keep my versions of documents here so as not to fill up my laptop. The Time Machine backs up the latest versions which are always on my laptop, if I lost any of the WD drives it would be a shame, but nothing disastrous.
