Noob question about sharing music

[Jimmy2013]

Hi all - have a noob question here about using FreeNAS. I currently have an old (but fast) Win Laptop w/a USB 1 TB drive sharing about 500 GB of music and video through my wifi network through an Airport Extreme router and mainly using a new MacBook Pro Retina and an Apple TV to play music and videos.

My question is will FreeNAS speed up and give me any benefit over what I'm doing now? After lots of trial and error, I finally got the network drive working just OK enough where it's sort of reliable, but reading and writing to the NAS drive plugged in to the Win laptop can drop off, hang and freeze my system, mainly because the network drive will mysteriously disappear at times.

Will FreeNAS help with the data transfer rates at all and solve the disappearing drive issues? I believe I have my wifi setting configured optimally through wireless G, but again the network drive disappears sometimes, hangs, etc.. Any benefit of using this software?

Thoughts? Thank you.

 

[cyberjock]

No way to know. I'm confused as to how the USB 1TB drive is attached. USB is notorious for dropping a disk if there is even a single read error(its documented thoroughly in the forum and if you even hint that you want to use USB drives for storage with FreeNAS you'll get laughed at). More than likely that is your problem, and the solution is to not use USB for things that should be relegated to a server. Using files over Wifi has its own issues with Wifi disconnecting and reconnecting, etc.

FreeNAS will work as well as the hardware you plan to use. I will tell you that laptops do not make good FreeNAS servers. Partly because there are no internal drives so you must use external(see above for why USB is bad) and there isn't an interface that really works well except SATA/SAS. They often have prioprietary NICs, limited RAM upgradability, etc making them very poor options for servers.

 

[Jimmy2013]

Thanks for the reply. It's a Seagate 1 TB USB drive plugged into the laptop via USB, which has audio and video on it. I am sharing that thru the laptop on my wifi network that my MacBook Pro is looking at.

Honestly I live in a small apt in NYC and don't really have the room for anything larger than a laptop. I had it lying around not doing anything so made it into the media server. If there's a way I can use it as a server that would be preferable over using something else. Thanks again.

 

[cyberjock]

Well, its like this:

USB hard drives for long term storage = really bad idea, strongly advised against in the forums
Sharing over wifi = slow, so advised against unless you understand that it may be so slow it won't stream a single video.

There is no wifi support in FreeNAS at all. So unless you are connecting to your network via a cable it definitely won't work.

Now can you use a USB hard drive? Absolutely. Just like I can go jump off a bridge if I really want to believe that angels will fly down from the sky and save me from a horrible death. Is it smart to do that? Most everyone will tell you that it isn't a smart idea at all. And as you are yet another example in this forum of what happens when you trust USB hard drives for long term storage, its your choice to make if you want to use it. But if you end up losing your data on a USB hard drive you shouldn't expect much sympathy. There's plenty of "examples" of lost data from using USB in the forums, plenty of "examples" of wifi not performing up to par, etc.

USB hard drives make excellent portable sources for data. But they should never be trusted to be used long term as a sole source for your data, and definitely never without a solid backup at all times.

 

[Jimmy2013]

Hey I appreciate that, but I have an auto-backup process set up for my media so yes I know about the perils of saving important data on a USB drive, I do have a regular backup scheduled so I should be more or less ok there.

But thanks for the input. I am still on a mission to speed up my network media playing access with my existing hardware or nominal cost additions it looks like, but again thank you.