Alternative to PC storage

masscrazy · 2 Jan 2014 at 10:07

I've got 7HDDs and a SSD in my machine.

My plan is to eventually have a watercooling setup and the 750d with two rads cant hold all those.

How does adding these drives to another machine and accessing them through the network sound?

I use these regularly mostly to read from.

I have a HP Microserver which can take 4 disks. I know technically it can work but does it sound like a good alternative to having them in my main rig?

dan958 · 2 Jan 2014 at 10:38

I have a network drive that I store quite a lot of my files on. Music, movie files (all my recordings) etc.
Transfer takes a bit more longer - but not too bad.

Havana_UK · 2 Jan 2014 at 10:38

You'll want at least Gigabit Ethernet, or access will be painfully slow especially if transferring large files, but otherwise it shouldn't be an issue.

dazza13 · 2 Jan 2014 at 10:39

No reason why it would not work fine from your microserver either, as good an alternative to having them locally.

or just look at one of the 4 bay nas boxes, synology or qnap.

Solaris · 2 Jan 2014 at 10:41

You can get multibay esata enclosures...

masscrazy · 2 Jan 2014 at 10:43

Yeah, I wont exactly be doing much transferring. Mostly reading from the drive and downloading to.

The microserver is gigabit networked.

So i was thinkng instead of having windows on disk i would have some kind of os on a usb. Any suggestions?

dan958 · 2 Jan 2014 at 10:46

masscrazy said:
Yeah, I wont exactly be doing much transferring. Mostly reading from the drive and downloading to.

The microserver is gigabit networked.

So i was thinkng instead of having windows on disk i would have some kind of os on a usb. Any suggestions?

I'd always have an OS on a hard drive/SSD. You can set up linux to run via CD/USB - but I don't know how good it is for normal use.

masscrazy · 2 Jan 2014 at 12:26

Just taken a look at freenas, seems to be the one.

Can run on usb and access quite easily with local ip, map to windows network drive. I'm gona try that out.

abbotsmike · 4 Jan 2014 at 01:51

Just as food for thought, when I move out I'm planning to build up a server running server 2012 R2 (on an old athlon 64 initially, could be fun!) with a small SSD for the OS, and 3 or 4 drives for media and backups. All will be gigabit networked, and built into my old midi tower case. Initially it will serve files and be a DLNA server, later down the line I may add capabilities.

Server 2012 is free through dreamspark if you're a student.