NAS questions

F

FraGGleR

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 4, 2004
Messages
384
Ok, I wanted to revisit a NAS or similar device for storing all of my movies, music, etc. I am putting this post here since you all know about media storage and streaming and I really don't want to get too much into the networking or other nitty gritty of it all. Currently everything is stored on my main core2duo rig and is networked wirelessly. This works fine except that I have to have my computer on all the time if I want round the clock availability. I have almost enough parts to build a small computer, but I was hoping to have it be very quiet and very energy efficient. I have seen some NAS that are both, but it is hard to stomach $200-400 pricetags for diskless enclosures.

First off, does anyone know of some simple, cheap NAS's that might suit me. All I need them to do is store my media to be accessed by all my computers. Not really planning to do backups or anything like that.

Second, what is the minimum read speeds that I need to hit to have DVD's streamed without hiccups? What about an HD movie encoded with x264? I have seen some NAS's that looked ok, but people objectively called them slow.

I am looking to spend about $100 on the enclosure, and dropping another $100ish on a new 500gb drive to go into it.

Thanks.
 
I agree, I was looking for a NAS solution a while ago, and found many people suggesting FreeNAS here when i searched the forums. So i used an old P2-266 system with PCI ethernet and SATA and its been running like a total champ. You can use it to just use one disk like i did, or you can expand and create RAID arrays and such pretty easily from the looks of it.

If you don't have something laying around you can find NAS enclosures at newegg, but a lot of them don't have power management features like spin-down after long periods of being idle. And you're going to be limited to one disk
 
Question about Freenas...

Does it have any sort of power saving options to put it into suspend??? I've got my client systems set to go to suspend and I am working on trying to see if I can get my SageTV server to do the same. I've thought about adding a dedicated FreeNAS systems with a couple 250 GB drives running on an old Dell GX110 system, but the key would be able to get it to power down after an hour of inactivity and then power back up when trying to be accessed.
 
Currently I have about 200gbish of permant collection on harddrives, but I am about to rip another 50-60 movies to have on demand. I wanted them accessible on the network.

I currently have an athlon 64 2800 (socket 754) plus mobo and ram and a cheapo case with power supply that a buddy of mine bought and then gave me after he went with a dell. I definitely thought about the freenas route, but was wondering about power management. I am trying to do this with as little power draw as possible or I would just leave my main rig on all the time. Does anyone know what the typical draw would be for a system like this with a 500gb samsung drive? I have read about undervolting, etc but was unsure if I could actually get it down to the 20-30w levels of a lot of the NAS's that I read about. Also the case is loud as stink (only has a single 60mm fan that spins on full all the time).

I have definitely been looking at that Linksys "slug" but couldn't really determine if it could move data fast enough for streaming. Does anyone have personal experience with this product?

Thanks guys.
 
farscapesg1 said:
Question about Freenas...

Does it have any sort of power saving options to put it into suspend??? I've got my client systems set to go to suspend and I am working on trying to see if I can get my SageTV server to do the same. I've thought about adding a dedicated FreeNAS systems with a couple 250 GB drives running on an old Dell GX110 system, but the key would be able to get it to power down after an hour of inactivity and then power back up when trying to be accessed.
Click to expand...

I just looked through all of the webconfig pages, all I can find are options to spin down the disks after prolonged periods of inactivity. There is an unsupported feature that will start some sort of Power Management daemon, with a description:
"Enable the system power control utility
The powerd utility monitors the system state and sets various power control options accordingly."
but it failed to start on my server so i can't tell you any more about it
 
I have an old hp system i use.
http://img284.imageshack.us/img284/4531/img0558mediumta7.jpg
I painted it black and had that decal made for it though.
Its got a P3 933 and a 320GB hard drive and only stores music
running 2000pro on it and use remote desktop to do anything that is necessary (nothing is though) Have network shares set up with permissions. The thing hasn't been restarted since last December. I thought that it finally died yesterday, but it was the switch that it was plugged into that was acting up.

So old comp + 2000 pro is my suggestion. Possibly Windows Home Server if you can. I have the beta, but it needs 512 MB and 1ghz processor so it refuses to install. If you are used to windows systems it is perfect.
 
I've always found this software interesting.

http://www.lime-technology.com/

It's basically a jbod with a parity disk, so you can put different size drives that you have laying around in. You have to use the largest drive as a parity drive and stick to an HCL for some components like NIC, but it's what I might go with unless I hit the lottery and just buy a small EMC san.
 
Will the FreeNAS work in a Shuttle box with it's onboard NIC?

If so, I guess I finally know what I can use that thing for.

How bout a good ripping program?
 
Its at least worth a try. you can boot FreeNAS off of a USB thumbdrive, if it recognizes the network adapter you're good to go. And if not, you can pick up a cheapo one for like $10. The one i use is just a crappy PCI 10/100 i got at staples for $20.

If you're talking about ripping CD's to mp3's in windows a lot of people like Exact Audio Copy. Under Linux people seem to like GRIP. I think both use the LAME codec to encode Variable BitRate mp3's. I get good results with EAC, but windows media player choked on them occasionally, i had to make the buffer bigger in the playback options.
 
I think I'm going to keep my music in Itunes on my main PC, I'll just be ripping DVDs to the NAS. So I guess I am looking for DVD ripping software.
 
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