Recent content by DiscreteMeat

OK, you've convinced me to give it a shot. And if I come to the conclusion after testing that FreeNAS is too much for me to handle, I can reformat the HDDs and put them in a pre-built NAS box like a Synology or QNAP and add the data back and all is well? i.e, it does no harm to reformat and...

You make some very valid points. I haven't tried yet and the only harm would be if I encounter issues with maintenance and need to do repair work. That's when I may be in over my head because I'm not a BSD/ZFS expert. I'll refer back to an earlier post in this thread which has me concerned.

You're right, I misunderstood. I'm quite new to this server/NAS stuff and I guess I wasn't clear in my post when I said "use a QNAP or Synology 2 or 4 bay NAS for storage wired directly to the T20 and my router". I meant via Ethernet cable. Thank you for the clarification. The reason I was...

I just received an order for the HGST 4TB NAS HDDs I purchased from NewEgg. There was a sale a few days ago and I decided to grab five of them. Well I wasn't too happy when the box they were shipped arrived looking pretty beat-up, courtesy of UPS. My NAS isn't up and running yet as I'm still...

I read differently, that you can actually wire a NAS box directly to a media server running PLEX. If I were to install Windows 7 or 8.1 on my DEll T20 and then install PLEX, from what I read I would do the following: On the server (my Dell T20) I would map the local IP address of the NAS (my...

Server 2012 R2 would be over-kill for my needs and the cost alone steers me away. I'm wondering how well Windows 10 would work as a file-server OS? This is exactly the reason I'm thinking FreeNAS may not be for me. It's probably over my head and I'd have to spend weeks trying to get up to...

Good point, I think I'll heed your advice. One thing I was wondering is since this Dell T20 only holds four 3.5" disks (wich is all I really need) if I wouldn't be better served (no pun intended) to go with something like the QNAP TS-451 4-Bay Personal Cloud NAS for ease of setup and...

Why that choice? Well, I visit Slickdeals from time to time and my timing was just right to pick up this deal: Dell PowerEdge T20 Server: Xeon E3-1225 v3 Quad, 4GB DDR3, 1TB HDD, DVDRW - $249 AC AR + Free S/H @ Dell I thought about building my own but this seemed like a great price for a...

Lots of views but no replies. Can someone please comment and share their opinion?

1.) I'm considering FreeNAS but there's other flavors out there, like NAS4Free and OpenMediaVault just to name a few. I know there's a learning curve but are they mostly similar or does one stand out for some particular reason? 2.) HDDs come in different flavors and NAS specific drives are...

Its a great deal because its essential "free" and free will always get people to swarm to a product but honestly, the amount of hassle to drive to the store (which is an hour away for me) and have to argue with managers if they give you a hard time at checkout... To me, it just aint worth it...

While I agree that to drive these cans properly a true headphone amplifier and/or speaker amplifier is required, it does NOT need to be driven from a balanced amplifier, and from a source with balanced outputs. A high quality amplifier with unbalanced I/O jacks connected to a high quality...

Great price and tempting but I'm unsure of buying a card by PowerColor. Not exactly one of the Big 3 card manufacturers. Not sure how much that matters though.

Here's a better benchmark test comparing the two chips Intel Pentium G3258 vs Core2 Duo E8400 A bit of a concern though is what is states in the conclusion about multimedia: The G3258's Achilles heel is its poor multi-core performance which is over 50% weaker than the group leaders. For the...

Thanks for the info. If your e8400 is doing a decent job then with the G3258 being being newer and more powerful, it should make for a good chip for a PLEX server. N41 Intel Pentium G3258 vs Core2 Duo E8400