A newbie with high standards

Riggy · 22 Apr 2015 at 10:52

Good morning,

So a little background first;

My current situation is, my main computer has all my movies stored on it, so when I want to watch a movies from any of my 3 Raspberry Pi's I have to turn on my power hungry computer to watch stuff.

So I'm currently in the process of building myself a low footprint computer, so I can use it as a central file server in the house. It'll be on 24/7, so there isn't any faffing about when we want to watch any movies.

I'm not really sure what im getting myself into, but im hoping I'll solve any problems I come across with a little patients and googling I suppose. So my question is, what am I getting myself into? I want to be able to freely transfer files to the file server from my main computer or laptop. I also want the file server to be on a local network only and have no access to the outside world at all.

Is what I'm asking too much for a novice or is my idea very doable?

lumencreative · 22 Apr 2015 at 11:09

What you're asking is all pretty standard stuff really, although, I probably wouldn't have gone down the route of building a computer for this kind of stuff. You might have been better getting a HP Microserver or a dedicated NAS drive, both of which are likely to be cheaper than building a small pc.

However, take a look at FreeNAS as that will do everything you wish to do. You could also take a look at XPenology which is based on the Synology firmware but I've no experience using that.

TallPaul_S · 22 Apr 2015 at 11:18

Dead easy, as has been said already.

Depending how much storage and what redundancy you want, drives will be your biggest cost.

I'd pick up a Gen8 HP microserver for £120 after cashback, load up your NAS software of choice (Xpenology is very simple to use), you'd be set up even with file shares (dead easy to do NFS sharing on Synology) within an hour.

Oh and if you want to transfer a lot of data over the network to your NAS< make sure you have at least a Gigabit network. Transferring stuff at 10/100 speeds is slooooo....oooow.

Riggy · 22 Apr 2015 at 11:56

I decided on a small PC because I had a micro-atx, i3 2130 and an SSD lying around. So I thought I'd put them to use

FreeNAS, this OS able to stream content to the Pi's? I've had a quick look and it looks like a very very good option. I due for lunch break soon, so I'm going to have a gander at both options provided

Thanks!

No doubt I'll end up with a million and one other questions in my head

Riggy · 22 Apr 2015 at 19:50

I keep seeing the minimum specs being at least 8GB. But I only have 4GB available. Am I likely to struggle along with 4GB?

Biz.Kid09 · 22 Apr 2015 at 20:19

Could always get it all up and running with 4gb and if your seeing any noticeable problems then whack another 4gb in!

lumencreative · 23 Apr 2015 at 09:34

I wouldn't worry too much about only having 4GB. Obviously the more memory you have, the better it will run, but you can always upgrade that later on.

nickcardwell · 24 Apr 2015 at 13:25

for os look into unraid, when not in use the drives power down.

FrankJH · 30 Apr 2015 at 20:50

nickcardwell said:
for os look into unraid, when not in use the drives power down.

I have an unraid server and its fantastic bit of software, but being a novice possibly a little complicated, but at least its free for two or less data drives (or used to be) - but remember with with unraid you lose your largest drive for the parity.

Its very scalable but can be highly time consuming at the start (although Ive had mine running for several years now, so they may have made it easier for an initial setup since).

I would go with one of the other options to start unless you are very confident

Most software will power down when not in use with the correct software setup so that isn't a reason to choose Unraid over anything else (in my opinion anyway)