Ocelaris

What does the freenas say, is it also in 100 Mbps? if you have an ssh into it, you ran run this command: [root@YourLinuxBox]# dmesg | grep -i duplex e1000: eth0 NIC Link is Up 1000 Mbps Full Duplex, Flow Control: None If your Bro's PC is gig, the only difference between you and him is that Asus DSL-AC68U and the 2 wires... so my first preference would be to plug in straight to the BT HH and see if you're getting Gig, if you can bypass the ASUS DSL-AC68U or swap the gigabit switch for the Asus does that change things? Some switches have auto-negotiation, but if it's not, you can use a crossover cable to be sure. The other thing is that your ASUS DSL-AC68U may have a "WAN" port, which may only be 10/100 that you're plugged into. Since you're plugged in directly to the ASUS, then your "link" is 10/100, but that's all it tells you, it doesn't tell you past the first switch (Asus DSL) whether it's 10/100 after that. So it's probably just your link, so try to narrow down where it says 10/100 and where it says gigabit. If you have a laptop, it would be extremely useful here to find out what links say gig vs. 10/100. Remove variables until you find the "bad" link.

Since I have no idea what retailers are available in the Philipines; I'm just going to make one suggestion, whichever case you have make sure you get air movement over those drives. At a minimum I would get fans blowing across all drives (if they're in the front of the case), but better would be to have one in the front and back pulling air across. Cable routing and proximity to the motherboard/power supply are also key. A case is a case is a case; but hard drives without air movement build up heat and die. I've had my server in 2 different houses, in 3 different locations, and the greater the heat, the more drives would die. Just my $.02

Yeah, I would just get a cheap wireless card, much easier than adapting the tiny antenna cables that you'd need to install as well... For the price of those antennas you can buy a whole card.

For about 20-30$ you need to get a cable tester to verify all pins an your cat6 are making contact. 10/100 ethernet uses 2 pair (inner orange/blue wires). Gigabit uses all 4 pair; so if you are missing a pin then it will fall back to 10/100. If all pins are making contact, you don't have any issues with the RJ-45 connector. 99% of the time it's not the cabling slowing you down. More likely what you're seeing is that your firewall/router or Asus isn't gigabit completely. Basically what you should get is a true gigabit switch, and then have your slower router or wifi access points tapped off of that. Just make sure that your computers can get to wherever they need to go without going through your router which is probably the limiting factor. Are you sure your BT HH supports gigabit? Also just because a port is "gigabit" doesn't mean that it can flow gigabit through the backplane, i.e. the switch might not be able to pass data fast enough. If you're really worried get a nice cisco prosumer gigabit switch and tap everything off of that, and only use your access point and router as taps off of that switch.

I would turn "Legacy" off, you should only be using UEFI, legacy being "bios". Also turn off "compatability mode" for UEFI. When I set up the GPT I had a 350 Meg EFI partition (fat32), a 128 Meg MSR, and the rest for windows as NTFS. I would think if you delete ALL partitions, Windows will create those automatically if it detects that you're in UEFI; but if you're not fully UEFI with compatability mode off, it would think you're using BIOS/MBR. I think your key is windows thinks it's in bios still, not UEFI. This is how I built it out in Configuration Manager, but I haven't done it by hand. In Lenovos there are like 2 or 3 options to make sure you're using UEFI, if you hit all those I believe windows will "know" that you're using UEFI and use GPT not MBR. Once I had those I was able to create an image with UEFI/GPT, otherwise windows would do BIOS/MBR. Just be careful as some drivers are/are not compatible with UEFI or BIOS. With an X99 you should be fine though. A sony laptop that I built an image for wasn't backwards compatible with BIOS, and some Lenovos (specifically the onboard i5 intel 4500/4600 graphics drivers) weren't forward compatible with UEFI. Basically you HAD to have compatability mode enabled to do UEFI/GPT, but the drivers weren't supported without compatability mod; so windows reverted to doing MBR/Bios. http://www.windows-noob.com/forums/index.php?/topic/6250-how-can-i-deploy-windows-8-in-uefi-mode-using-configuration-manager-2012/

If it's outside, make sure to get the waterproof/sun resistant jacket. Most cat 5/5e/6 is not meant to be exposed to sun/water over any length of time. The jacket on the outdoor cabling is much more resistant. IMO, 5e is fine, and that's what I used in my house and that $hit is permanent!. Terminating 6 is a pain, especially if you've never done it before (the cross inside). But if you're just running 1 cable, it's not that tough to make either. If you're going to run more than a few, definitely get a tester, nothing fancy, but just to confirm that all your pins are crimped correctly. I have wired probably a 100 houses, and just did our new house, and out of 40 some runs, I'd say 3 had a missing pin or two, and had to recrimp them; without a tool it's hard to tell if you missed a wire or you have it hooked up wrong. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16899261015

The reason the two look similar is that the mini-pci slot is similar to the M.2, but I am not sure 1) they're bios/controller compatible, or 2) they're physically compatible. There have been "M.2" looking slots for a long time, basically just tied in off the PCI or PCIE bus, but until recently no bios supported booting from them (not sure whether it was chipset or bios compatability). I doubt you're going to fry it, but you'll have to get the mini antenna adapters etc... http://www.machinaelectronics.com/blog/a-guide-to-mini-pci-laptop-wireless-cards/

Just curious what other people are using to back up their home nas boxes. I have a 4 year old CentOS box running 6x1TB drives in Raid 5, then 2x 2TB drives for backup (not using ALL the space of the raid5 at the moment). I'm thinking of retiring the old system, but if you end up having a 10TB + system what do people do realistically to back it up, a whole separate raid for just backups? Basically by the time you're done you're losing more than half your drive space JUST for backups, i.e. if you get 4x 4TB drives, that means you get another 4x 4TB drives to back that up... I'm just not comfortable with running ONLY a raid without equal disks backing that up, because in the 4 years I've probably replaced 8 drives safely but once I lost 2 at once and had to rebuild the array from backups once; without those backup drives (nightly) I would have lost everything. I have email alerts set up for backups and smart monitoring alerts. Creative ideas? Tape System etc...?

Bonnie++ is the *nix benchmarking tool of choice for disk throughput testing, though it's not hard to run, it's a bit confusing the output. Also iostat -x 5 is a good "how many MB/S" am I getting, but you'll have to provide a read/write operation, as it only monitors. Sysstat is the package which contains iostat.