Gigabit Ethernet

With the recent arrival of our truly excellent ReadyNAS NV+ box, the time had come to upgrade the house’s internal network to gigabit Ethernet, i.e. 1000 Mbps instead of 100 Mbps.

The house’s internal cabling is all CAT5e, so all that was required was to purchase some gigabit switches. I finally settled on a trio of Netgear products, the 16 port GS116 for the server cupboard under the stairs, the 8 port GS608 for my office and the 5 port GS605 for the TV area in the living-room. More switches will doubtless follow at a later date, but that’s all we need for now.

In fact, even now, we scarcely need that kind of speed. It’s handy for the short bursts of high traffic that our network occasionally sees, such as when performing back-ups at night, but not for much more than that. Once we start sending video around the house, though, the network’s new-found agility will come in very useful.

The switches are all operational, but the one in the office is still only operating at 100 Mbps, so I suspect the wall socket has been hacked, and four of the CAT5 wires split off to wire a second socket to provide service to a telephone. I’ll have to look into that and, if necessary, unsplit the port.

I haven’t done any testing to determine how good our network throughput now actually is, nor to test how fast NFS reads and writes to the ReadyNAS are performed. Jumbo frames are enabled on the network, though, and you should take care when selecting gigabit equipment to ensure that anything you buy provides this feature. Otherwise, you’ll needlessly surrender 10 to 15% of your potential network performance and put a higher load on your equipment.

Apart from back-ups, basic file sharing service and providing the music storage for our Sonos system, the ReadyNAS is now also providing the accommodation for some of our MythTV recordings.

Since MythTV 0.21, the system has had the concept of storage groups. Basically, this allows one to define a set of storage directories and give the grouping a unique name. Subsequently, when telling MythTV what to record, one can dictate which storage group is used for any given recording. In this way, the storage load can be split over two or more file-systems.

MythTV doesn’t actually do much in the way of load-balancing, however. It won’t use the second directory unless two recordings are scheduled to record the second time, or the first directory fills up. Consequently, not a lot of programmes will get recorded onto the NAS unless I explicitly set it as the storage group for some of our recordings. Currently, only live TV viewing and Eloïse’s episodes of Nijntje are explicitly set to record onto the NAS.

In short, after a couple of weeks with the ReadyNAS, I’m enormously happy with it. Just having the protection of redundant network storage is already a great feeling, but upgrading the network to gigabit speed unleashes its full power.