NAS box/media server

House · 21 Mar 2011 at 10:33

I'm in the process of upgrading my home network and while I'm holding off on my main PC till later in the year my current main now looks like it was involed in a car crash with a truck full of hard drives. 5 internals 3 externals & 2 external portables it's a data loss disaster waiting to happen.

Anyway what this means is I need to sort out a media server. It's going to be serving an whole range of devices (xbox, ps3, dnla TVs and bluray players and even laptops and portable devices). it's going to need to have allot of useable storage (at least 6tb) yet still have some more safety (raid 5 I guess?).

What do people recommend? It's an area I know very little about and with NAS being a 3 letter word you can't search for it here

Thxs

kae2 · 21 Mar 2011 at 11:05

I'm really liking the HP Microserver, but I only have one or two live connections to it at anyone time. I don't know if it'll pack enough punch to do what you want?

a1ex2001 · 21 Mar 2011 at 11:38

kae2 said:
I'm really liking the HP Microserver, but I only have one or two live connections to it at anyone time. I don't know if it'll pack enough punch to do what you want?

Plus 6TB in raid is pushing the capcity limit on drives in the box if you use RAID!

If you want cheap and easy with plenty of space then an i3 system in a midi case should give you all the room you'll need. The spec would handle your current requirments and give you room to up the capacity in the future as your data storage needs will inevitably grow.

One serious condiseration is backup though, 6TB is a hell of a lot of data to loose and while RAID 5 will protect you against a single drive loss it won't get the data back if someone pinches the server etc. I wouldn't want anything close to that amount of stuff without an off site backup!

Demon · 21 Mar 2011 at 12:13

House said:
I'm in the process of upgrading my home network and while I'm holding off on my main PC till later in the year my current main now looks like it was involed in a car crash with a truck full of hard drives. 5 internals 3 externals & 2 external portables it's a data loss disaster waiting to happen.

Anyway what this means is I need to sort out a media server. It's going to be serving an whole range of devices (xbox, ps3, dnla TVs and bluray players and even laptops and portable devices). it's going to need to have allot of useable storage (at least 6tb) yet still have some more safety (raid 5 I guess?).

What do people recommend? It's an area I know very little about and with NAS being a 3 letter word you can't search for it here

Thxs

I've not bothered with RAID, it's main strength is resiliance (e.g. no downtime when a single disk fails), but at the end of the day it needs to be backed up separately if you value your data.

I've gone for just using individual disks, and all my backup is done using a 'sync' process once a day (night actually!)..
Not being RAID, I can easily swap out a 2TB HDD for a 3TB HDD just by copying the contents via any easy mechanism (to external USB/eSATA) then swapping the drive over etc.. so you can start out by getting 4 x 2TB Drives, and worse case, just mirror 2 of those (4TB) to the other 2 drives each night using any simple Sync backup agent..
If I want to increase my storage, I can
1. Buy another Microserver and rinse and repeat (I did buy 2 now, they are so cheap)
2. Start swapping out the 2TB's for 3TB's when they become cheaper (DO it in pairs)
3. If I decide I can live without backing up some media (i.e. will just re-rip if required) I can stop backing up on the drives, and just use that backup drive as storage..
4. I could put a 3TB HDD, with a small partition for the OS, the other for storage, giving me 5 storage drives.
5. Use the eSATA for an additional HDD

The HP Microserver is absolutely more then man enough for some pretty heavy file sharing, the highest bit rate a BR movie could be in theory I think is 50Mbit/s, which is approx 5MB/sec which is nothing in terms of the CPU power of the box, it would do 5+ of these with ease..

The main consideration is transcoding, if you want on the fly re-coding of video, then it's not up to that job at all, you'd have to look into offloading to a PCI-E video card.. etc..