PPRuNe Forums - Direct ethernet connections

Job done!

As documented, the NAS is a RAID1 Western Digital Mybook World Edition II 1Tb. It now lives in the garage as is used as part of the backup strategy for my work laptop, my wife's Netbook, and a media server with truck loads of photos and videos in the monitored folders to which I copy things when I'm done with editing them. It is also used for streaming music from our large collection of CDs that I've ripped over the years. Plugged in to the NAS is a 1Tb Seagate USB HDD loaded with non-HD and HD movies. I have made a vented secure box, with the vents covered by fine mesh to stop creepy crawly ingress.

Having discounted using fibre on the grounds of cost and complexity (not least radiusing some of the corners necessary) I have run Cat 5e cable from the garage roof to a Netgear GS605 gigabit switch in my office, from the switch to the living room ready for when I buy a PS3, from the switch to the media server, and from the switch to the HomeHub elsewhere in the house. I am getting gigabit performance on all runs except to HomeHub as it only supports 100Mbps but this is fine as I don't need to stream HD to the ethernet over mains or the wireless sections of the network.

All buried cable runs in an old (dried out) bright yellow hose pipe for ease of visibility if I need to locate it (or if anyone finds it by accident) and as basic protection. By coincidence the pipe outside diameter is a nice snug fit in to the 22mm diameter rigid tubes that lead to the stubs on the circular plastic inspection boxes that I used to cover the holes through outside walls. These boxes have sealed lids and the holes in the walls were sealed with mastic so the Cat 5e should be fine for very many years.

The house and the garage are electrically bonded by sheathed 10mm lightning conductor cable to try and equalise ground potential in the event of a lighning strike to either.

I learned a new skill in all this too; how to terminate Cat 5e cables with RJ45 plugs! Thankfully my employer lent me a high quality crimp tool for the job (okay, and gave me all the cable, plugs, and strain relief boots too!) so the only tricky part was keeping the strands in the correct sequence whilst trimming to max 1/2 inch and then keeping them aligned whilst inserting in to the plug. The first one took 20 minutes and three "trims" before I was happy, but by the end I was shelling them like peas. No wasted plugs, either. For anyone else needing to do it, I found this guide helpful: CAT5 Stripping and Terminate - Ch 1

So, after all this work and aching muscles, how does it work?

Just great! :)

Backups that took an age over an ostensibly 54Mbps full strength WiFi connection are now done in little more than a blink. Non-HD movie streaming that was sometimes blocky over WiFi even when nothing else was competing for air space with it is now rocky steady. In fact, the same applies to HD movie streaming from the USB HDD plugged in to the NAS at the same time as hammering the NAS RAID1 mirror with several large backups and audio streaming to two internet radios. No User would ever know the others were there. Perfect! Even HD movie buffering in such a scenario is now done within a couple of seconds versus 30+ seconds for non-HD buffering over WiFi.

WiFi has it's place in the home (I still have two internet radios, a Netbook, two laptops, and a printer so connected via two access points), but then so does Cat 5e as I have proven :)

Happy camper!
Well worth the effort.
Now to enjoy :)

Thanks for the help and advice in this thread.

XV