Home Network Setup

Yeah I think so, I just wish I could find a good laptop dock like a lot of Windows laptops have to set up dual monitors and other things of that nature.

That router is about the same price that I was looking at anyway.

I had been looking at a Netgear router with two antennas at 2.5? I think.

LINK

That's good stuff man, Thank you.

You wouldn't happen to know anything about the docking station for my mac now would you?

How long do you think it will take the flash memory hard drives to come down on price?

I have a Lacie rugged TB now, but I want to get a flash memory instead of the disk.

Keep in mind that the ASUS router he linked has USB 2.0 ports, so regardless of your frequency and client adapter, any interfacing with your networked USB drive will be bottlenecked by USB 2.0's 280 Mbit/s (35 MB/s) effective throughput, assuming you can even hit close to the theoretical 450mbps throughput on a single device (if your macbook is the only real PC in the house, it will be the only device that's theoretically capable with the appropriate adapter anyway). If your primary use of the home network will be to access a networked USB device, don't feel like you need to rush out and get even a "great" router, or a triple-antenna (with 3 spatial streams per antenna) adapter.

There are routers with USB 3.0 (assuming you have or will get a USB 3.0 external drive), but you'll need to read reviews that focus on the USB 3.0 interface to be sure that:
a) the ports are shielded. USB 3.0 uses a spread-spectrum with high noise and can cause interference if unshielded. This is generally only a problem with the 2.4GHz band, though.
b) There isn't still a significant bottleneck due to the router's chipset itself when dealing with large data files from USB to network.

The ASUS linked above is not a bad router at all, but buying it primarily for a USB-based home server might be a waste, especially if we're just talking about one computer and some tablets/phones with only 2 or 3 people actively using the network at any given time. If you want a true home "cloud" with the highest throughput possible, a NAS is the way to go obviously. You'll just be spending a lot more for an effective NAS and capable hard drives.

If you're serious about a home server for local storage access, you might want to consider an AC router. The IEEE 802.11ac standard was approved this year, companies are continuously releasing firmware updates, and there are plenty of perfectly capable AC routers on the market. It's, of course, more expensive than the ASUS N900 router (but not twice as expensive). If paired with an appropriate client adapter, would give you much higher throughput over wifi if you ever decided to go with a true home server/cloud using a NAS, for example.

But, if you are simply trying to pair a bunch of mobile devices and one single PC with one USB hard drive (and that's your ultimate goal), that ASUS would be fine and perhaps overkill. Ultimately, as I said, don't feel the need to rush out and buy top of the line equipment just so your Macbook and a few iPads/Rokus/iPhones can talk to a USB 2.0 external drive.

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At what point, would you feel, is it necessary to make the jump from a USB-based home server to a NAS? The majority of the time, yes, it will just be a couple tablets, phones, and one true PC operating on the network. However, I would like to remotely access my files if I were away from home for instance. Would this be possible with just a USB based server or would I need to upgrade?

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As far as speed goes, you certainly would not need to upgrade, because when remotely accessing your home files via the internet, the bottleneck then becomes your upload speed from the ISP, or your download speed wherever you're accessing the files. You can access the USB drive remotely with ftp and using the router’s Internet port IP address. Whatever router you get will likely have instructions for doing that.

Great, this definitely clears some things up for me. I'm kinda learning a lot of the tech stuff as I go so I am loving this new board.

I would assume I would be able to play movies and other stuff I would keep on my external on my appletv and iPad. The VLC app is pretty awesome for the iPad.

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i'm still a cat6 man. i dont like network hiccups.

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If you're referring to having everything hardwired, that is what I would prefer as well, but I'm currently renting an older house. It's nice, don't get me wrong, but I really don't want to crawl through the attic to rewire the entire house and the internet line only runs to one room.

When I eventually build a house it will be done the right way, that I can assure you. I will still have the external networked though to be able to access it remotely by IP.

So another problem that arises if you make your external accessible from remote locations is that your IP address would be broadcast for all the world to see. Wouldn't that make it easier for people to mimic your mac address and then access your internet browsing history and see everything you look at? I.E. bank statements that you view, etc.?