What OS + M/B?

Skyboat

Skyboat

Skyboat

Soldato
Joined
13 Jan 2005
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Right, so I've sourced a Fractal Array R2 chassis, which as you know can hold up to 6 drives.

As my media streaming and storage needs grow, I eventually want to keep adding additional drives into one big drive pool either via RAID or through some other method that involves data redundancy. Which OS and/or software would be best for this, or any add-on cards too for that matter?

With this in mind, on the motherboard front, the case can take either ITX or DTX, what would anyone recommend? Either integrated or socket CPU, preferably Intel but would also consider AMD variants.

Advice muchly appreciated :) Cheers.
 
Hum, still can't decide on the motherboard - I'll see what bits I have lying around to see if I can cobble something together on the cheap.

The point I was trying to make was that I'm not going to have 6x3TB drives lying around to RAID together, I'll have about 3 or 4 drives ranging anywhere between 500GB to 2TB each.

I've been looking at both Drive Bender, using WHS 2011 as the OS, or unRAID, a Linux distro; and the pros and cons of each. They both use software which is an alternative to hardware RAID, that allows pooling of disks and dynamic expansion, replacement, and merging - none of which hardware RAID controllers can do easily or for relatively cheap.
 
It'll only be for storage and streaming, however I'm contemplating whether to just get a Zotac DTX Atom board or something more powerful in socket form to help with transcoding. The expansion slot will of course be used up for additional SATA ports; though, Jetway do an expandable motherboard that is able to provide 4 extra ports without compromising the expansion slot too which may be another option.

I think I've decided on getting WHS 2011 with FlexRAID installed, gives me more options in terms of streaming then with Plex and PS3MS among other tools etc.

Just a lot of research really to see what hardware/software combinations are out there to match my needs tbh. I wish they made more DTX boards too :P
 
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