XigmaNAS

Hello all,

I'm a current FreeNAS user. I'm considering switching over to NAS4Free, mainly because it looks like is supports wireless?
I'm assuming once I have my NAS4Free server connected to my network I could access the server with my PCs that would have 802.11AC wireless?
Would the server need to be connected to my router or switch via Cat5e/6 or could the server also use 802.11AC?
I'm also considering using a quad-NIC card in the server to do teaming for all 4 ports to get as much speed as possible.
The NAS4Free server would not only act as a file server/repository, but also as a media streamer.
If I do the quad-port NIC, and do teaming, would I need a managed switch? Not sure how difficult that would be to set up, since I'm not a networking genius,
but when it comes to hardware, I learn quickly.

Sorry for all the questions. Thanks!

Your client computers can be wireless but of course this will be a bottleneck. NAS4Free itself doesnt support wireless adapters. NAS4Free does support NIC teaming (LACP) but please understand how it works before you go down that road. You will also need managed switch.

http://nex7.blogspot.com/2013/03/ipmp-v ... -mpio.html

Neither technology should be looked at as a means by which to improve the speed one client to hit one server with - for instance, if your client has a 10Gbit NIC and your server has 4x1Gbit NIC's, bonding all four 1 Gbit NIC's together with either technology will not then allow the client to send it data at 4 Gbit/s - it will still only go at 1 Gbit/s. Often even if you enable bonding on both client and server, the single-transfer throughput will remain one NIC's worth (but multiple transfers may, depending on settings, be capable of going down other links in the aggregate, thus allowing multiple link-speed transfers at once).

On speed, you are only as fast as your slowest link. Wireless is generally 30-40 meg, so that will usually be first. Yes, if you have the new 5ghz N, you can get 300 meg... And I do not think any of those nics have full FreeBSD drivers...

Next is drive speed itself. Spinning platters generally get about 150meg reads and 100meg writes. With a good raid setup, you can get faster than this, if you have lots of drives. (Not counting parity)

So, unless you have about 40 drives, and no parity, (or 8 very fast SSD drives without parity) you will never fill that 4gig nic.