Question Another 'new house' networking question

Chris147

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Hi all

Me and the family will be moving to a new property in the next month or so and it requires a lot of work doing so want to try and get the network stuff in whilst it's in a mess and just want opinions really.

The equipment will be housed under the stairs with adequate ventilation so was wondering what people think of the following and if anyone has any suggestions or better ideas.

I currently just have a WD MyCloud 3TB network drive which is nearly full so would like to upgrade to a four bay unit so that I will have plenty of storage for films and music in the new house. I'm not going to stay with WD as it is a very slow and clunky interface and have been looking at a Synology unit but having just looked on eBay there are quite a few decent rack mount units available which have caught my eye. I appreciate that they would be overkill for a home setup but obviously I could save a few hundred by buying used (I know you run the risk of failure etc with used equipment).

The plan is to use a NAS to supply video and music around the house as well as provide back up for photos (quite in to photography so eating up GB's of storage is quite easy). So far I've discounted having a DVD in the rack under the stairs because everything gets ripped to the NAS straight away but am open to suggestions. I'd use Kodi or smart TV's to access the films.

Ultimately I'm considering the following equipment and layout of cabling:

Router with wifi
NAS (open to suggestions but would like around 16TB of storage - unsure as to run RAID or not)
Netgear FS750T2EU ProSafe 48 port switch

LAN ports

Sonos - 4
CCTV system (standalone rather than IP) - 1
Living Room 1 - 2
Living Room 2 - 4
Kitchen - 2
Bedroom 1 - 2
Bedroom 2 - 2
Bedroom 3 - 2
Bedroom 4 - 2
Study - 2
Loft - 2

Garage - 1
Summer house - 1
(would run 2 cables to each though just in case)

So that would be 27 connections in total with a few spare for expansion in the future.

At the moment I'm using a small PC to run Kodi on the main TV and am not sure whether to put this with all the other equipment and use a HDMI matrix but given how cheap streamers are that will run Kodi or similar not sure if it's false economy.

I'd also consider fitting extenders outside as well so we can have wi-fi everywhere a few more ports may get used or possibly POE.

Any advice would be appreciated but does my idea seem feasible?

Cheers
Chris
 
You haven't said how many Wi-Fi clients are envisaged and what their use case is, but you may care to consider provisioning additional Wi-Fi Access Points (AP) rather than expect a single AP (in your router) in a cupboard to handle everything.

Of course it's difficult to advise on how many AP's and where to locate them without seeing the site and knowing the device mix, but Wi-Fi generally works best with line of sight (especially in the 5GHz frequency band) so the fewer walls and other structures between stations, the better the chance of it working well. Even if you don't install the AP's now, you might care to install the cabling while the building is being knocked about so you can add AP's at a later date without a cabling exercise disrupting the decor.
 
I'd also consider fitting extenders outside as well so we can have wi-fi everywhere a few more ports may get used or possibly POE.

You really don't want to be using extenders. When you're putting cables everywhere anyway then you're far better off running cables outsides and using access points instead.
 
Thanks for the info re access points not extenders. That was the intention with running the cables to the garage and summer house to have wifi there so I'll start looking for AP's.

As for in the house itself I think that the place where the router will be going is pretty central so I'll just have to see what coverage is like when we're in the place.
 
I'd recommend looking at Unifi Ubiquity for your Wifi. They do some very good kit and it is really cheap. We use it at work (100+ AP) and I have one at home. They do need setting up via PC or their own CloudKey but then they just work. They also do PoE switches, routers and cctv.
 
Not sure what you saw on eBay but something to consider is the noise and power consumption of your network devices. Enterprise servers usually don't worry about how quiet they are and Enterprise switches can be even noisier and don't like small areas.

The power consumption when leaving something all the time will also eat into your electricity bill. Every 100W of power costs ~£85 a year or so left on. I was doing some testing of switches and one 48 port ate 100W. I went back to a 24 port which was just under 20W still high compared to some but I already owned it.
 

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