Various questions... HTPC's, MKV's and NAS

mediaman · 29 Aug 2011 at 10:07

I have been looking into building a htpc for ages now. One of the major stumbling blocks for me was (and still is) speccing a case with adequate storage space for my constantly expanding blu-ray collection. With most cases only having a couple of bays, they simply don't cut it for my needs.

A NAS might be the solution, but I just don't have the knowledge in this department. What would be the advantages or disadvantages to building my own NAS as opposed to buying a ready to go one? My concern with the ready built ones is that once I occupy all the drive slots, there is no more room for expansion, and back to my original problem.

Is it easy enough to build and configure my own nas and have it running freenas? Easy enough to add hard drives as and when required? Be fast enough across my network to stream large blu-ray mkv's to a htpc? I have many more questions than answers at the moment. Some help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

R088ieS86 · 29 Aug 2011 at 12:31

NAS enclosures are expensive if you have more than one drive.

Building a low power media server is a much better and cheaper idea!

More space for HDDs and easier to upgrade if needed.

Reaper 392 · 29 Aug 2011 at 12:35

not a very good solution, but the simplest solution would be to spam external HDDs whenever you run out of space

Makhaira · 29 Aug 2011 at 12:40

Build an HTPC with the storage internal to be honest.

Things to make sure of:

- Display that will output 1080
- Gigabit ethernet (if you're going to be moving large MKVs around a network it makes all the difference)
- Quiet HDD, or SSD for main OS drive to keep noise down
- Biggest 3.5" HDDs you can get
- Quiet/silent cooling
- Optical out for sound (means you can output to pretty much anything in full surround)

R088ieS86 · 29 Aug 2011 at 17:13

Reaper 392 said:
not a very good solution, but the simplest solution would be to spam external HDDs whenever you run out of space

Very expensive way of doing it! 1TB external HDD £60. 2TB internal HDD £55.
In MKV format you get about 40films to 1TB of space. Not a lot!

Good thing about having a media server is you can add several htpc's to you home and not need to copy the same files to their HDD's.

It also means that you build a SFF htpc with no worry about fitting big drives in them.

This is similar to my project this month. I grabbed a cheapish rackmount case off a popular auction site, this can fit 7 x 3.5" drives and 3 x 5.25" drives in with the motherboard and psu. Now as its acting as a server when I run out of room with the 3.5" bays i will move into the 5.25" bays. so without modding 10 bays for harddrives.

I only buy 2TB drives because anything bigger is a rip off atm.
So thats looking @ 20TB of storage (eventually).

As far as FreeNAS goes i've never had a play with it. I have a simple llinux install which has been ok. Might have a play with it this week if you want some feedback.

mediaman · 29 Aug 2011 at 20:39

Thanks for all the replies.

Some feedback on freenas would be appreciated mate. I was thinking a system running freenas might be easier to configure as opposed to learning linux, especially as I have litterly only used linux for about half hour and even that was about 10 years ago.

Low power media server does sound good though, especially the low power part. Some more info on what components etc you have would help. My current pc consists of a massive lian li case which is perfect for multiple hard drives. I could find a home for my main pc and use this as a starting point for building a home server.

I still have many more questions though. Im not even sure whether my router can cut it, I have an old lynksys wireless g. How do you have your server all connected up and is it capable of streaming 25 gig+ mkv's?

RJC · 29 Aug 2011 at 20:47

I'm currently using the HP Micro server with FREENAS 8, updated this today from 7. I have 4 2tb hard discs in 2 x RAID 1 setup, one is for my pc backup and the other for all the films - which I need to copy back over.

I use the AC Ryan mimi 2 to lay the files.

mediaman · 29 Aug 2011 at 21:02

Im so baffled I must be missing something here. All this laying the files and streaming malarky, im not even sure this is what I think I need. Basically, I was hoping to store a mass of hard drives in an old computer, whack all my rips onto these drives, then be able to access these files from a media pc (or any other pc/laptop) in another room running xbmc or something. That's it in layman's terms. How would one go about this from the top? I don't really know much about networks other than the basics.

R088ieS86 · 29 Aug 2011 at 21:35

Yup thats what we do.

Media Server holds the data (media files {MKVs})
That is plugged into your network switch.

Your HTPC is plugged into your TV (and the network) and streams the films over the network.

In short:

jbs · 29 Aug 2011 at 22:06

I have a similar setup to what Ro88ies86 posed above. The "Server" in my setup is a self build and did not cost much. Second hand case (Fractual Design R2) with 10 hard drive slots, socket 775 motherboard with cheap second hand dual core processor. I'm running Windows Home Server which does all my PC backups in addition to serving the media, but you do had a lot of options here.

The server is much more flexible than a NAS, I even do some of my encoding on the server an just let it run in the background.

Confused · 29 Aug 2011 at 22:49

I've just got myself this along with a basic Celeron processor and 4gb memory as a replacement for my "server" machine.

The case can hold (I think) 9 drives (5x 3.5" bays and 4x 5.25" bays) and I've currently got 3 drives in there. Very understated case, too. Not too flashy.

Then I've got another old system (IP35/Q6600/4GB/8800GT) hooked up to the TV in the living room. Nothing is stored locally on the HTPC, so the hard drive does very little (other than LiveTV buffer)