Looking for a NAS (~8TB usable space) to use with MediaPortal (2 Viewers)

[JimCatMP]

Hm - I know a number of other people have gone Win 8 and seems to work, however, who am I to ignore such sage advise

It would not be for several months till I got to that point anyway, so I'll take a fresh look at how things are then - but W7 64bit -very stable, so it is the clean option as of now

TTFN - JCMP.

 

[Zuzler]

Basically what I want is as follows:
One box, which is sitting in the basement or anywhere else in the house. It contains all my movies, music, series and maybe other shared documents like pictures and files for the whole family.

Here, every PC can connect to. My notebook only needs the documents, maybe music sync options (but that can be done via copy/paste if there's no other option)
Then, there is the HTPC-Client in the living room. It connects to the server and accesses all movies etc. It also contains a SAT card itself (if that's not possible I guess I could also put the SAT card into the server)...

I don't mind a week or two messing with the system as long as it works afterwards.

Is there a "sample"-build around somewhere? I.e. which parts to use, power usage...

 

[kiwijunglist]

It's up to you

1. You can go NAS with SAT card in the living room's HTPC
Advantage = You can choose a storage solution that doesn't use windows
Disadvantage = Living room HTPC has to be on to watch/record tv

2. You can make a low power cheap PC running windows for the NAS
Advantage = It can also act as as a tv server for all your PCs
Disadvantage = Has to run windows

 

[Zuzler]

Oh, that's one thing I didn't realize.When I put the SAT card in the living room's HTPC I can run any system I want on the storage. Thanks for pointing that out!
The HTPC has to be on either way when I want to watch TV. So it would only be a factor for recording TV, which I normally don't do.

Off to look for a good NAS then

 

[kiwijunglist]

Get a NAS that can run utorrent (if you use torrents a lot), you can also get NAS's that run VPN servers as well if you want to run a vpn.

 

[Zuzler]

I don't trust torrents too much. But SABnzbd runs pretty much everywhere
So are the various qnaps out there a good deal, or are there more renowned manufacturers out there?

 

[JimCatMP]

DONT DO IT @JimCatMP - I just tried Win8 for my mp client + server, i'm going back to W7, Metro was cool, but W8 was buggy and caused lots of small annoying htpc related problems & niggles!!

Despite the advise - I had a go:->

Clean Win 8 install on old laptop, added the termserver patch for Win 8, so I can RDP in AND play MePo at same time.

MePo - needs .Net35 - this was a glitch, I found installing via the dotnetfxsetup.exe simply not to work - downloaded the full dotnetfx35.exe and installed with no problem.

Then 1.3 Final installed without a glitch - note, operating as CLIENT a only, TV Server is separate Win 7 box (which may explain why I had no issues), content on separate NAS.

Install MovingPictures & MPTVSeries via extension installer, config couple of shares for Video & Music, then dump a copy of thumbs DIR + movingpictures & MPTVSeries databases into correct locations, copy Shortcutter.dll & xmk files into place, then all systems go.

Works well, no problems so far (watching Red Dwarf X on it now), browsing movies & music and removing service in RDP window.

You mileage may vary obviously - but on 2007 vintage laptop 1.3 on Win 8 looking good - I have still to tune the Win8 system to remove lots of services I don't need, but so far so so good.

TTFN - JCMP


One thing - if you have MePo set to autostart for one user, too turn it off for another user (I have Player autologin on console and user Manager for RDP), you now have to ue TaskManager StartUp tab to control it - it's msconfig in XP & Win7.

 

[The_Stig]

A question to all the NAS-experts here around. I have the following situation, which bugs me: HTPC is coming out of resume from standby and takes quite a while until MP is responsive again. I suspect the two physical hdds to be the culprit of this (they are spinning up). On these hdd are all my media files. Would MP react faster if I install a NAS on the basement (meaning wouldn't MP then wait for the network drives to be ready, or would it wait too?)

 

[DJBlu]

A question to all the NAS-experts here around. I have the following situation, which bugs me: HTPC is coming out of resume from standby and takes quite a while until MP is responsive again. I suspect the two physical hdds to be the culprit of this (they are spinning up). On these hdd are all my media files. Would MP react faster if I install a NAS on the basement (meaning wouldn't MP then wait for the network drives to be ready, or would it wait too?)

The delay would only be when starting media playing as you would have to have the drives spin up on your NAS.

If the NAS is on 24/7 with the drives spinning then yes it would speed up the start up.

I would test the speed up by disabling the drives in your htpc first to see if it improves.

 

[kiwijunglist]

I would test the speed up by disabling the drives in your htpc first to see if it improves.

This, I doubt removing the HDDs will speed up startup. I have 5 HDDs in my HTPC. They don't spin up sequentially the spin up in parallel. Test first