my next project - need some help though

wildman · 10 Apr 2011 at 19:48

I have got a collection of around 1000 DVD's and about the same again in Music CDs. What I want to do is copy these all to a mssive storage device and then be able to access them like an on demnad service.

Having done some reading I already know what software i need to rip all the DVDs to hardisk but I don't want them on a stand alone machine. I want to put them on to something that I can access from anywehre in the house.

So I figured I need some kind of a NAS, but I have never set one up before so I was hoping you could give me some pointers as to what hardware I should be looking at getting for this porject ?

PhillyDee · 10 Apr 2011 at 19:56

Personally, I would build a server PC. NAS drives are limited in what they do, and can be difficult to upgrade. I have a windows home server PC, and it has 6 drives in it for a total of 7Tb. Show me a NAS thats affordable that can take that amount of storage.

What sort of budget do you have?

SparkyG · 10 Apr 2011 at 20:00

I have had both a server & a NAS and I prefer the NAS due to how small it is. However like phillydee says a server is cheaper for larger storage options

wildman · 10 Apr 2011 at 20:08

thanks for the replies, I guess the server route is much better sokution then. So what Kind of hardware should I be specing for this then ? I want around 6 TB of storgae to start with. Also I guess this means I need to get a copy of windows server 2003 ?

Tonester007 · 11 Apr 2011 at 00:13

wildman said:
Also I guess this means I need to get a copy of windows server 2003 ?

As mentioned by phillydee, for your purposes Windows "Home Server" would suffice; it should also be cheaper than 2003.

PhillyDee · 11 Apr 2011 at 02:52

You really want the V1 of Windows Home Server as well! The newest v2 (or Vail) is a worse version and offers no benefits over v1.
There is a massive thread in the windows forum if you fancy a look!

I run mine in an i3 with 2Gb ram. Purely because my previous board blew up! It doesn't need high performance, and the lower power you can make it the better.

Pick a motherboard with plenty of SATA ports, then just buy the bog standard processor, and the cheapest ram you can find, can be a single stick. I would make it 2Gb though. 1gb would probably suffice tbh.

You will probably need a graphics card when installing, but this can be removed as you usually admin it from a different PC. I use TightVNC or the windows connector software.

It has other advantages, such as being able to backup your PC's every night, and folder level redundancy (duplication of files to multiple drives). Also remote access so you can access your files anywhere in the world.