Help setting up home network

Robbie_821

Junior Member
Feb 5, 2013
2
0
0
I am attempting to help my son network 7 computers (PC AND Mac laptops), a large tower gaming computer, printers, a gaming system (XBOX), a Wii, 55" flat screen TV, stereo system and other portable devices (IPad, surface, mobile phones/smart phones), etc. in an old house to store their video files, pictures, music, watch videos (via Netflix), listen to music and of course Gaming (Halo, Call of Duty, Mario Brothers, etc.). He needs quite a bit of storage for all of their movies and music but not all 7 computers would be likely to access movies/music at one time. More likely one computer would be used to link the music files in storage to the stereo system. With the movies, maybe one person would want to watch a DVD alone, but the rest of the housemates would want to access a movie stored in a networked storage device/file server, or use Netflix to stream it to the big screen TV. Gaming would need the most resources as all want to access the program together so they can game on the big screen TV - they also may have more than 7 computers playing the same game together. The TV is located on the main floor, one laptop in a bedroom on the main floor and the remainder of the laptops are upstairs, depending on where the housemates are.
The house has a Cable modem coming into the main floor of the house and a wireless router (unknown brand) is plugged into the cable box.
How can he 1. Set up a storage device (NAS? Raid? File Server) for storing all of the videos, music and game files. 2. Set up a network so all the computers can access movie files, music and games, no matter where they are within the house. 3. What special equipment would he need to buy? Obviously as a young adult, $ is a huge consideration, or should I say lack of $ is a huge consideration. My son does have an old empty computer tower and he has been given a number of working hard drives after his friends buy new laptops (don't know speeds or brands). He was thinking of using the tower to set up the storage device: setting up a file server for the music and movies, but wasn't sure if a file server/NAS/Raid was the best way to go for the gaming. In addition, his files on his computer are backed up using Crashplan so an off site back-up for the "centralized files" would have to be a consideration. He also mentioned something about redundancy in the file storage system after he spent days recovering files after a computer crash. If one of the drives failed in the storage system, he wouldn't have to spend days reloading all of the files and/or operating system.
Any assistance would be appreciated.
 
Last edited:

kbp

Senior member
Oct 8, 2011
577
0
0
# 1 - wired
# 2 - wired.
With all of these devices wireless/bandwidth will be a problem.
 

JackMDS

Elite Member
Super Moderator
Oct 25, 1999
29,516
408
126
Robbie_821, I would suggest that you edit your post, make few distinct paragraphs according to subtopics, generate a double space list of the few important questions.


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