State of My Home LAN

Things settled here. NAS4free proved to be fabulous. Stable. With regular updates steadily improving on visible cosmetics which gives me confidence in behind the scene work. Very convenient for use. Therefore it is not surprising that I ran out space on the main pool I use to store video files. I also need to add new storage to NAS and migrate photos and Lightroom catalog there. My NAS box found its permanent place on a network shelf in the laundry room. I love the case and the 3- and 4-drive racks are very convenient. And, yes, they look just cool.

HTPC got a passive CPU cooler and the HD rack was removed to free space for it. HTPC is still noisy though - 7k rpm HD and power supply can be easily heard. But when music or movies are played it does not matter. I doubt I will ever install SSD in this HTPC, if only to cut on noise. Can I even migrate the existing Windows 7 install to SSD? I remember reading that this NVidia disk controller does not handle SSD well. I suspect the main culprit is power supply fan anyway.

Running inSSIDer shows how busy the WiFi 2.4GHz band is. There is a total of 64 access points available for WiFi clients in my living room. I had to change the channel to avoid overlap with the most powerful neighbor.

I also got myself a refurbished Cisco WAP610NRM and set it up on an unused channel in 5GHz band. Just to off-load iPhone5 and office laptop traffic.

Windows shows the 960-5 connection as having about 100Mbps speed. I wonder what would it take to increase this connection speed….

EDIT: Changing the channel width from 20 to 40MHz more than doubled the speed!

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