Best storage device for media serving over lan?

Ol!ver

Ol!ver

Ol!ver

Soldato
Joined
4 Oct 2003
Posts
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Location
Sheffield, S.Yorks
OK, I'll give you the situation and you tell me the best solution:

I've just bought me an Apple TV, and I want a way to be able to hold all my movies, music and TV shows somewhere nice and quiet. At the moment I'm keeping most of it on my desktop machine, but it's too noisy and power consuming to leave on 24/7. I've got a spare Toshiba laptop that's doing nothing so I'm thinking of using that to share the media. I'll need a nice large driver though, and I was thinking some kind of NAS device would be best, that way I could access it from the desktop too.

Looking for 500GB or 1TB depending on price, and it must be quiet and safe to stick under the bed/in a cupboard out of the way.

Any ideas?
 
Have a look at Windows Home server on a cheap Fujitsu or HP new server (sub £150) and put it up out of the way, attic is always good. It will serve all of your media and also backup any Windows based machines that you have.
 
Pandobear said:
Have a look at Windows Home server on a cheap Fujitsu or HP new server (sub £150) and put it up out of the way, attic is always good. It will serve all of your media and also backup any Windows based machines that you have.
Click to expand...

They really that cheap? Having said that, won't the laptop I already have do it OK with the addition of some storage?
 
They really are that cheap, an Intel based dual core 2160 Fujitsu server can be had for sub £120, comes with one internal 160GB drive and 1GB ram and one years on site warranty. From memory they support six sata devices, including the included DVD reWriter. I have one of the older dual core 3GHz versions running as my Media Server, 24/7, works perfectly and very quiet, contrary to popular opinion. They all have gigabit lan cards built in, that are actually capable of gigabit speeds, unlike most of the embedded NAS devices. MY server is capable of a sustained 75 MB/s across the network, most NAS users on here seem to be happy to reach 7.5 MB/s, well when I say happy.....

I seem to remember that due to limitations of the software, Windows Home Server is not supposed to run on laptops, though I can't think of any sensible reason for this. You would be well served to look into this, as I may be mistaken.

I would look at getting one of these and installing a couple of OCuks Samsung 1TB drives, again very quiet and very good value. You can then turn on replication on the flders that are important to you, and make sure your data is protected. This is a much more capable solution that any of the embedded linux solutions, and probably at not too dissimilar a cost.

I also have a HP media vault which has one 320GB hdd installed, but can have a second hdd added to boost storage. This is an excellant embedded linux solution capable of upto 12 Mb/sec or so that will be making it's way onto the bay soon.
 
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Thanks for that reply, might be worth a look. Do you get these direct ? Drop me an email if you like, address in trust.
 
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