Build NAS or buy?

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Stupid_Newbie

Gawd
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Dec 4, 2005
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Hello. I'm looking into a NAS to store my BD rips. Before I was hand raking them down, and storing them on a WD MyBook live 3tb. I'd like to now rip lossless copies onto a media server/NAS. So 25-30gb per movie (rough guess). I don't have a ton of movies at this point (30 or so I'd guess) but will be adding a lot once theater is done. So right now I have lots of room. I'd like to have redundant copies, I'd hate to have a disc fail and lose hours of ripping, so 50-60gb per movie.

My question is this, is it worth building a NAS for this, when you can get things like a 6gb mbl, for $500?

A rough guess puts 6gb MBL as holding about 120 films (in raid), give or take. Could you do better building your own NAS?
 
I would build your own. I don't know what you mean by a "6gb MBL", but if you build your own, it'll likely be a little more expensive than that $500 quote. But, you'll have a lot more options now, and down the line. And most likely better performance.
 
Yeah can't exactly say with 100% certainty whether or not to build or buy if we don't know what "6gb mbl" means.
 
I think you are going to find 25-30GB per movie is a lot and you will run out of disk space pretty fast. A reasonable bit rate and sound choice can yield a nice result at around 10-15GB depending on how picky you are about picture quality and sound. I would suggest you consider buying a proper NAS but be prepared to spend at least in the $500 range to start with before you get to buying drives for it. I would recommend looking at QNap and Synology. Start with four bay models or more if you want.
 
Oh, ok. Well, in "RAID", that thing will only hold 3TB anyway, as it's just two 3TB drives. Honestly, I wouldn't touch that thing with a 10 foot pole. QNap, Synology and Drobo if you need a pre-built, mostly plug and play NAS device. I, personally, would go with a better home built system consisting of a real RAID card driving some enterprise drives. But that's me.
 
Sorry about MBL, i mentioned it earlier in post in full, figured i could abrirvate.

So in building one for a media server, what enclosure and type of HDD are suggested? Just 5400rpm? Others Second enterprise drives? I figure 1tb, I'll get 30 movies in a raid setup. Are enterprise drives that good I could forgo raid? It would just suck to lose 120 rips if a 3tb drive bites the dust in a non raid config.
 
Buy a Qnap or Synology if you can afford it. Fill it with 3tb Western Digital Red disks. Enterprise disks are not reliable enough to forgo raid and they are significantly more expensive.

Buy a WD MyBook Live Duo if you can't afford the above.

Don't make your own NAS unless you will actually get enjoyment out of building it and maintaining it. For those of us who do, DIY is the obvious choice. It's an unnecessary hassle for everyone else.
 
kristof said:
Don't make your own NAS unless you will actually get enjoyment out of building it and maintaining it. For those of us who do, DIY is the obvious choice. It's an unnecessary hassle for everyone else.
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this
 
i would refer buy one. the value of nas is software. the hdd is not special. but the built in software would save you so many time.
 
Stupid_Newbie said:
Sorry about MBL, i mentioned it earlier in post in full, figured i could abrirvate.

So in building one for a media server, what enclosure and type of HDD are suggested? Just 5400rpm? Others Second enterprise drives? I figure 1tb, I'll get 30 movies in a raid setup. Are enterprise drives that good I could forgo raid? It would just suck to lose 120 rips if a 3tb drive bites the dust in a non raid config.
Click to expand...

in your case, 5400 is good enough . idk how many big do u need for hdd. i suggest 2tb run raid 1.
 
kristof said:
Buy a Qnap or Synology if you can afford it. Fill it with 3tb Western Digital Red disks. Enterprise disks are not reliable enough to forgo raid and they are significantly more expensive.

Buy a WD MyBook Live Duo if you can't afford the above.

Don't make your own NAS unless you will actually get enjoyment out of building it and maintaining it. For those of us who do, DIY is the obvious choice. It's an unnecessary hassle for everyone else.
Click to expand...

I would agree with this. If going down the DIY route and you don't want it to consume too much of your time I would say stick to a familiar OS like Windows 7 or WHS. That way you still work in a common environment and the programs will likely work across all platforms. TBH, some of the setups other forum members have make my head spin. To me, it wasn't worth it to go down that route to learn a completely different system and buy $300 raid cards. WHS2011 has done everything I've needed it to do without getting too complicated for me. Of course if you have the time and desire I'm sure some of the other Linux based OSes have more robust storage systems.
 
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