On Wed, 8 Oct 2008 16:07:50 +0100, "ChrisOfTheOT" <NoSpam@xxxxxx>
wrote:
Quote:
>I'm stunned - are you saying the gigabit has marginal speed advantage over
>USB 2.0? Or have I miss-understood? It that's the case, I'll just get a 1TB
>USB drive and be done with it.
No, sorry, I was comparing gigabit to 100mbit network. If you get the
NAS, you can make everything gigabit and the NAS can probably utilize
some of that speed. Note that NOTHING runs at gigabit speeds. Drives
aren't that fast, buses aren't that fast. 100 mbit ethernet is faster
than USB 2 by about a factor of 2 as I recall.
Most desktops and laptops won't go past 60-70mbit speed so the
standard 100mbit network is plenty for two machines to network. The
exception would be someone who has multiple machines all trying to
stream 60mbit at the same time - then you can chew up some more
bandwidth. Also, as the traffic grows, collisions and retries grow.
The gigabit bandwidth helps with that.
Quote:
>Your suggestion of accessing data via the central machine would require that
>the laptops are permanently connected to the network (as I understand it),
>but I don't think that would be convenient. But, I fear I may not be
>understanding properly... *blushes*
Yes, that is what I was inferring. The cleanest arrangement is that
you keep all the data on the server, not the clients. You back up the
server. Clients become somewhat unimportant - if one crashes you can
just use another.
If you decide that that is really not what you want to do, then you
can keep data on the clients - but the downside is that they have to
be hooked up to be backed up from. Depending on what software you use
to back up, you could either pull the data to the server or push it
from the clients.