NAS Suggestions (Replacing Monolithic Mediaserver)

Hello All--

I'm aiming to replace my monolithic Mediacenter (quad-core with 4gb RAM, etc) with an Aspire Revo and some sort of NAS solution. The primary reason is because running the mediacenter is pretty costly in terms of electricity, it's large, and my use case has switched from TV-Capture/Transcoding to watching video I have stored on the network. From what I've been reading, the Aspire Revo fits this bill very nicely.

This leaves me with the issue of finding a place to store all my Media. I was considering building another Atom box with a bunch of harddrives and FreeNAS, but think that is just overkill. I'm not looking for any crazy streaming or special functionality. Pretty much just looking for some file sharing which is easily accessible and avoid the gimmicky functions that some of these External-Harddrive/NAS units have.

We had a Maxtor NAS at home which my dad picked up, it had an overly proprietary web interface which was annoying as hell to store files on. On top of that, the damn thing required software to be installed on all the PC's in order to be effectively used. And Mapping network drives was spotty at best.

So to reiterate, I'm looking for simple and reliable. Basic web interface, with easy drag and drop access via Windows Explorer / Network shares either via SMB or CIFS. The ability to bring my own drives would be a plus too!

NeoMatriX724 said:

Hello All--

I was considering building another Atom box with a bunch of harddrives and FreeNAS, but think that is just overkill.

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Lol, well if thats overkill, maybe you can find some sort of tape system? Maybe Ebay some 5 inch floppies? HAhahaha

Seriously, I would think Freenas/Atom combo would be about as good as it gets from a cost to size to electricity perspective. Dont the Atoms use like 8 ( or was it 12) watts at idle??

First, I agree that a Freenas/Atom combo would be perfect (and cheap).

Second, reading the line about using 5 inch floppy disks made me think of this:

I present to you the floppy disk drive RAID!

I would have a look at unRAID, it's great for media servers. It's a NAS linux distro with some clever software RAID. You can use any combination of drives/connections as long as you have the biggest drive for parity, and you can upgrade/change drives in the future without difficulty. The only real downsides of it are that it's not as fast as a hardware array and you have to pay to use more than 3 drives.

www.lime-technology.com

If you're not wanting to roll your own storage solution, I've been very pleased with my Synology DS409 with 4 Hitachi 2TB drives in RAID 5. All my desktops/laptops/VMs see it just fine, regardless of OS.

Wipeout said:

If you're not wanting to roll your own storage solution, I've been very pleased with my Synology DS409 with 4 Hitachi 2TB drives in RAID 5. All my desktops/laptops/VMs see it just fine, regardless of OS.

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Pardon my silence on the topic, I've been in the process of moving into the new place...ended up having to push the internet set up date so I'm still without internet. I'm still flipping and flopping between the Synology lineup or rolling my own. Once I get settled in, I'll lay out a budget and go with whichever is cheaper. I'll keep you posted!