Networking question

X

xgalaxy

Veteran X
So I recently purchased a NAS, and I've got it hooked into my router. 1.5T of storage, oohhh yeaa.

Anyways, I have a retarded question. I'm curious about what the flow of the network traffic would be if I were to download from the internet directly onto the mapped NAS drive? Is the router going to be smart enough to dump directly to the NAS or will it have to route through my PC first, and then back through to the NAS?
 
Your PC is going to be doing the man-porn shuffle, taking bits from the Net and sending them to the NAS. But don't worry, network overhead won't be the limiting factor. If you've got a small 100Mbps network then it won't even remotely stress it. You'll be either external network limited or disk I/O limited.

edit: I can't tell external from internal networks. Hep me!
 
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Horatio Balderdash said:
Your PC is going to be doing the man-porn shuffle, taking bits from the Net and sending them to the NAS. But don't worry, network overhead won't be the limiting factor. If you've got a small 100Mbps network then it won't even remotely stress it. You'll be either network limited or disk I/O limited.
Click to expand...

^^

What he said.

Unless you can log into your NAS and connect out direct from that, the traffic is being managed by your PC.

Easy way to think of it: Your PC is doing the download. Your router has no way of knowing that your "x:" drive (or however you've got it mapped) isn't on the PC - it's only the host that knows that. So it comes to your PCs memory, hits windows, which is doing its "save as" to a particular file handle, and then dumping that to a disk. Whether that disk is connected via SATA, PATA, IDE, SCSI, USB, Firewire, IP, or whatever, that's a secondary consideration.

If you want a NAS you can dump stuff onto directly, make yourself a linux box, configure up a RAID in it, plug it into your network, and enable samba. You can mount whatever bits of disk you want on the network, and you can also log into the linux box to fire up any downloads you want directly, without the need for any 'controlling' client. For extra nerd-cool factor, you can plug your broadband connection straight into it and use it as your router, too.
 
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