Budget NAS

It definitely hasn't gone into spam folder, and I will make a live account when I get home and see if that works. Never had a problem with gmail before
 
I have had a Synology for a few year, but I only had a 1 bay drive. The problem with them is the hardware is so expensive, for very little spec. It's not actually very powerful and can be slow.

I've just recently upgraded to a HP Gen8 Microserver £144.99 after cashback, on.. well I won't mention the site but it begins with an E and it isn't ebay :)

Anyway, I have then installed XPenology on it, which is a synology software so your microserver can work as a synology NAS. I would definitely recommend it.
 
Would be DS215J be enough to stream .mkv files also mainly to PC for now. Might go to the odd tablet and smart tv later this year.
Or would i need a play version of synology?

Thinking of buying a NAS mainly to store media and photo's
 
Orange said:
Would be DS215J be enough to stream .mkv files also mainly to PC for now. Might go to the odd tablet and smart tv later this year.
Or would i need a play version of synology?

Thinking of buying a NAS mainly to store media and photo's
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Yes, as long as the files don't need to be transcoded.
 
So I tried with setting a MyDS account up using an outlook.com account, and still it isn't sending the activation email to that? That's 3 different emails I've tried now, and none are getting it - So anyone any idea what could be going on here?
 
CasKirensys said:
So I tried with setting a MyDS account up using an outlook.com account, and still it isn't sending the activation email to that? That's 3 different emails I've tried now, and none are getting it - So anyone any idea what could be going on here?
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Fine here. Try a different browser.
 
not wanting to hihack, but i have a rasberry pi 2 model B on the way and want it to run a NAS as well as some other bits, ive got 3tb of storage accross 4 drives.

What do i need to put them in to hook up to the Rasberry Pi?
 
I'd go with a microserver and run xpenology. Just set it up and love it. Paid 85 for the server off the mm, its powerful if you want it to be and expandable. I was using a dlink dns320, which was fine if you didn't mind 6mps transfer speeds, I'm getting around 90mps now from the microserver. Don't see the point in paying for the synology hardware when you can get something better than the budget range for cheaper :)
 
utajoker said:
not wanting to hihack, but i have a rasberry pi 2 model B on the way and want it to run a NAS as well as some other bits, ive got 3tb of storage accross 4 drives.

What do i need to put them in to hook up to the Rasberry Pi?
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I've done this, but you will need to know a little bit of command line Linux and know how to use an SSH / Terminal. Also depends on which distro / flavour - I'm using the Raspi version of Debian. I used PuTTY (portable version) to SSH into the Pi. IP addresses will begin with 192.168.0.X, and I just tried different numbers for X until the Pi connected. Once complete, you can use your Windows networking settings to 'find devices near you' to map the Pi up as a drive letter etc. Note that you'll only get about 12 megabytes per second over wireless as the Pi only has a megabit connection even if the router is a gigabit.

1. install Samba (the NAS server software)
Code: 
sudo apt-get install samba samba-common-bin

Note: if some of the install files report as missing (as some of the online guides occurred to me), then also run these lines.
Code: 
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install --reinstall samba
sudo apt-get install samba-common-bin

2. once installed, backup Samba's config file in case it goes corrupt.
Code: 
sudo cp /etc/samba/smb.conf /etc/samba/smb.conf.old

3. now edit the Samba config file. 'Nano' is the Linux version of MS-DOS' Edit.
Code: 
sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

4. once inside the config file, change 'yes' to 'no' on this line.
Code: 
read only = yes

5. save the config by pressing ctrl-x, then type y for yes, then press enter to re-write the config file.

6. restart Samba.
Code: 
sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart

6. add Pi as a Samba user, assuming that Pi is the standard user.
Code: 
sudo smbpasswd -a pi

7. create the disk share. The 'disk1' bit can be anything you like. I just used 1 disk personally so disk1 was what I went with. You can create disk2, disk3 and so on.
Code: 
sudo mkdir /home/shares
sudo mkdir /home/shares/public
sudo mkdir /home/shares/public/disk1

8. if using NTFS-formatted disks, then install the NTFS compatibility program.
Code: 
sudo apt-get install fuse ntfs-3g

9. then mount your disk drive (with it plugged in of course).
Code: 
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /home/shares/public/disk1

10. to view the currently plugged in drives, you can do an FDISK like in MS-DOS.
Code: 
sudo fdisk -l

11. of course, you'll want to mount the disk upon every boot if you're going to use the Raspi as a NAS :-) First, open the FSTAB batch file...
Code: 
sudo nano /etc/fstab

12. ... then add this line at the bottom.
Code: 
/dev/sda1 /home/shares/public/disk1 ntfs-3g defaults 0 0

If you want to unmount the drive later on, then use this. "Umount" isn't a typo btw.
Code: 
sudo umount /home/shares/public/disk1
 
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utajoker said:
not wanting to hihack, but i have a rasberry pi 2 model B on the way and want it to run a NAS as well as some other bits, ive got 3tb of storage accross 4 drives.

What do i need to put them in to hook up to the Rasberry Pi?
Click to expand...

Pi as a NAS is a bad idea imo, 100mbit ethernet is way too restrictive. Can only copy at 12.5MB/s
 
Would be fine as a music store for something like a Sonos. But anything else, would be painfully slow
 
Your requirements make no reference to power/heat, capacity noise or space. An older PC will cost you little or nothing combined with something like un-raid or xpenology etc. is going to be cheap, quick and do what you want to do while giving similar functionality to the commercial offerings.

If you want a low power sff platform then an older microserver is a decent enough shout *but* consider if you ever need it to do transcoding in the future then the CPU requirements may be better served with a conventional board and a celeron, something 1150/1155 based with 2-4GB will fit the budget (I use a 1037u based ITX baord) and be quite frugal on power with a suitable PSU. Either way although it's possible with a Pi i'd not suggest it was a role it's best suited to.
 
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Now please do forgive me for not 'getting' the price of NAS drives. Even a three or four bay NAS is usually towards £200 for a top brand which confuses me. Aren't they just a smallish amount of RAM, a Raid controller, modest PSU and a relatively low powered CPU? Why are they considerably more than the equivalent Micro ATX PC? Could you just buy an older micro ATX board, some DDR2 and a Pentium chip and build your own for much less?
 
MissChief said:
Now please do forgive me for not 'getting' the price of NAS drives. Even a three or four bay NAS is usually towards £200 for a top brand which confuses me. Aren't they just a smallish amount of RAM, a Raid controller, modest PSU and a relatively low powered CPU? Why are they considerably more than the equivalent Micro ATX PC? Could you just buy an older micro ATX board, some DDR2 and a Pentium chip and build your own for much less?
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I don't know where the price goes in NAS boxes like the synology stuff - that's why I bought a microserver - I can understand the pricing of them for the hardware!
 
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