Homemade NAS, or off the shelf NAS? (1 Viewer)

[BillyTheFish]

I live in a rural area and get a whopping 1.2 - 1.3Mbps. None of the Teleco's will upgrade the cabling or provide FTTC as it is not economic for them to do so. Bloody annoying as I still pay the same as those who get 8x this speed and a real pain to get OnlineVideos working really well.

Oh dear, I can just see it now:-

porky996t to his GF: "Honey, you may be wondering why we've moved houses to Central London right next to the telephone exchange. Well, funny you should ask..."

 

[SiLenTYL]

Hey all

Im testing out a new NAS ( QNAP TS-212 )

I put it to work as both timeshift and recording drive. Running it in RAID 0 (2x 2TBHDDs). I need to use the "Public" share or else it doesnt work for TV on a multiseat setup.

Instantly i found that i no longer get glitches when watching high bitrate HDTV on my client PC ( when compared to using my OS HDD as recording and Timeshift buffer drive), when my multiseat mp tv server/ gaming PC is watching a video in VLC(which usually causes the tv data feed to my client PC to glitch out).

Also, i get far better performance surfing the web on my tv server/gaming PC. I imagine that freeing up my OS HDD has somehow helped out my browser performance.
Will play with it a bit more over the weekend.

 

[SiLenTYL]

The post above QNAP TS-212 was from my work.

Im looking to get something a little different for home... like this:

HP ProLiant MicroServer series specifications - HP Small & Medium Business products

Get 8 GB of RAM(most it can take), a single 2TB sata2 HDD(sata2 is highest it can do) and i have a spare firewire card to plug in my FireDTV DVB-T tv tuner
I figure i can use it for bittorrents, mp tv server(recording and timeshifting), HDD storage(for movies and tv series), Teamspeak / Ventrillo server - all running on win7 64bit/windows server 2008 R2(64bit).... Plus anything else i find i need it for.

It ends up cheaper than the QNAP TS-212 or similar budget NAS' out there... and it runs windows.

 

[SiLenTYL]

I decided to pick up just a new HDD.. Seems good.. Minor glitches still On my client pc watching high bitrate tv when the gaming pc(running mp server in multiseat setup) is playing a video in VLC or especially using my blu Ray optical drive for anything. It's a sata3 hdd but I'm only running a sata2 board, but it's not the OS drive it's another internal.

WD RE4

pretty happy with it tbh.

 

[AlexanderIanHall]

I have Synology NAS units (DS408 & DS210J) although now all my media has been moved to a UnRaid (Home) file server. I now use the Synology units for storing photos and documents only.

UnRaid is similar to FreeNas and lets you have low spec hardware with very large storage - up to 40 to 60 TB is straight forward. I am able to handle 45GB BluRay ISO images from the NAS to MediaPortal without any issues - I used DaemonTools Lite to mount the disc images and have a standard 1Gbit network.

I switched from Synology to UnRaid for my main storage needs due to 3 reasons.
1. Cost - To expand to 40 TB+ of Storage on the Synology would cost much more than the equivalent unRaid server
2. Simplicity - For just a plain file server the extra functionality that comes with a Synology NAS is just not needed.
3. It is easy to re-use old hardware I had laying around and unRaid will grow to meet my needs from an original 3 HDD 6TB unit to now significantly more

It's worth looking at QNAP, Synology etc and also unRaid and FreeNAS. The nice thing with unRaid is you can set up a 3 HDD server without buying a license - sort of a try before you buy. I personally prefer to store my own movies as ISO disc images rather than MKV etc as I like to have the bonus material etc.

hth

Alex

 

[BillyTheFish]

AlexanderlanHall - interesting, I hadn't come across unRaid before. What made you choose it over FreeNAS?

I would definitely agree: for a NAS, especially if you are recycling old hardware, you want a light OS.

 

[AlexanderIanHall]

AlexanderlanHall - interesting, I hadn't come across unRaid before. What made you choose it over FreeNAS?

I would definitely agree: for a NAS, especially if you are recycling old hardware, you want a light OS.

I can't recall the original reason that I looked at UnRaid. I did see it mentioned on this or another forum at the time I was researching so decided to try it out as all you need to do is copy the unRaid files onto a USB thumb drive and you're good to go, it really is that easy. As I had a positive initial experience I then paid the license fee to be able to increase the number of HDDs up to 20+ HDDs. One of the big positives about unRaid compared to some of the competing products is the ease of expansion. e.g.

1) You can just add in new HDDs and they can be different sizes, i.e. you can create an array of 250MB, 500MB, 1TB, 2TB and 3TB HDDs all together and still have resilience via the parity drive.
2) You can start of with 3 or 4 HDDs and then just add in additional ones as your needs grow
3) You can easily replace a lower capacity drive with a higher one or just add the higher capacity one as well.

I don't believe FreeNAS has such flexibility

You'll find posts of some people reporting performance issues and you'll find posts of people with no performance issues. I can say that I copied a 36GB file from my unRaid server to my local Windows 7 PC and averaged 75 MB/sec sustained, this is more than enough to play a native BluRay ISO in high definition. The only performance issue I have had was a 'stuttering' sometimes when playing BluRay ISOs over the network. This ended up being caused by VirtualCloneDrive (used to mount the ISOs) and was fixed by switching to DaemonToolsLite.

The biggest question at present with UnRaid is whether to go for v4.7 or to try the 5.13 beta release. The advantage of the v5 release is that it supports 3TB HDDs and has a v3 linux kernel (among other things). At present I am still on v4.7 as my server is fairly critical.

hth

Alex

 

[SiLenTYL]

How about this board for a NAS idea..

VIA Launches First Ever Dual Core Pico-ITX Motherboard

The CPU at 1ghz should be enough for mp tv server and some hdds