Network hard drive makes external internet connection impossible!

March 29, 2007 12:12 PM

I have a NAS network hard drive plugged into my router that I use to host my iTunes library. Whenever I'm accessing the drive (especially when syncing the iPod or ripping CDs, but also sometimes when playing songs) all the computers on the network including mine lose most of their external internet connectivity. Is there any way to fix this?

The router is a Netgear WGR614v6. The NAS enclosure is a Coolmax CN-550, which is admittedly low-end. Is there another IDE network enclosure with a fan that would solve my problem?

posted by stopgap to computers & internet (5 comments total)

The fan isn't your problem -- the amount of network bandwidth you have is. Try buying a new router with gigabit ethernet.
posted by SpecialK at 12:17 PM on March 29, 2007

Switch to a router that supports DD-WRT and use the QOS feature to limit the bandwidth that iTunes can use.
posted by white_devil at 12:22 PM on March 29, 2007

Are you accessing the drive from a wireless computer? If so - you may simply be hogging all of the bandwidth that the router is capable of handling.
posted by odinsdream at 3:17 PM on March 29, 2007

I would suggest that you try installing the updated firmware package for the NAS device. It looks like there are some additional reasons for upgrading, so you may see improved performance.

It's possible that the way that iTunes manages the music database is putting too much of a load on the tiny processor in the NAS device. Not being an iTunes user, I'm only speculating. However, a quick Google search has turned up reports of similar problems.

A quick, although possibly costlier solution, would be installing NAS server software on an old machine. I used to run Freenas (http://www.freenas.org), which is free and open source. The system requirements are ridiculously low, (Pentium I class machine with 96MB RAM). Just make sure that if you're using some legacy harware, you don't run into problems with large hard drive support (137GB drive size limitations).
posted by Jim T at 11:49 AM on March 30, 2007

You might also be able to do something like set up a switch that connects to the router, and connect all the computers and the NAS to the switch. This might offload the router from the general network circuit that involves the NAS device, and so if your switch is working the way it's supposed to, you shouldn't have such a huge impact on the processing capabilities of the router's built-in switch unless a device were actually using the internet connection.
posted by kalessin at 12:37 PM on March 30, 2007