HTPC+NAS OS dilemna

W

watanabe

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 7, 2000
Messages
502
Will get back from vacation in a few days and will have the following hardware waiting for me:

i3 540 (was onsale for same price as 530)
8GB OCZ
Gigabyte h55n-usb3
Samsung 1.5TB x4 (had 2 in a raid1 nas, ordered 2 on sale)
WD 2TB x2 (went on sale, thought i could through these in the raid1 nas)
LG bluray burner (archival purposes/tired of poor selection of netflix streaming)
Seasonic x-750
Lian Li Q08
HDHomeRun dual tuner

originally I was going to use this as the basis of my main pc (hence the 8gb ram/etc) but decided to go up to matx for sli. Gotten tired of plugging in my wife's macbook to our 50" panny plasma everytime we want to watch a movie. We have PLEX installed on my wife's macbook and she seems to like that, so I'm looking into BOXEE or similar software (although luckily that seems to be platform independent) for this build.

I've used gentoo in the past so I'm not afraid of linux, however I'd like to keep this simple as it'll be used by my wife as well, so win7 may come into play. NAS wise this is going to be holding the usual: Bluray rips, family photos, backup of my main pc's work(CAD/cs5 files/etc)... some basic permissions would be nice (ie: i'd like important stuff like family photos, and my work stuff, to not be mounted/visible to normal users)

My dilemma is I'd love to have ZFS support as from what I understand it's a bit like a drobo/unraid and more flexible (in terms of adding different size drives) than a raid5... still doing research but hoping to get some feedback on the current stability of ZFS under FUSE or any other alternatives I could be looking at.

As it is I think have a few options hardware wise (mobo only has 4 internal SATA ports), but they sort of depend on the OS I go with (driver support/etc)

1. RAID5 from the mobo for the samsungs, grab a usb header to usb adapter(already have a sata->usb cable) for the bluray drive, USB boot drive

2. 4port sata card for the samsungs linux software raid5, bluray off mb + usb or small ssd for boot drive.

3. ???

I guess it all comes down to the OS though: I'd like something streamlined/simple for the family to use.


I realize this is kind of backwards(asking for help after having ordered), and not so to the point(can't really find a clear question in the post)... but that reflects the confusion I'm going through trying to nail down the final details of this build: hoping someone can kindly point me in the right direction.
 
Basically man, the general consensus of HTPC users is don't combine the HTPC and file serving duties together. It generally does not work out well:
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1419906

So you're looking at another PC for NAS or HTPC duty if you really want to do this right.

EDIT:
Some additional pointers:
- AFAIK, FUSE and ZFS has severe performance issues right now. So probably not a good idea to use that setup if going the Linux and Boxee route.

- If you still want to go with the ZFS route, hit up these two links if you haven't already:
Building your own ZFS Fileserver
FreeBSD ZFS NAS Web-GUI

- If you can, try out Boxee right now and see if it fits your needs well. Also, if you can, try out Windows 7 Media Center. Compare the two, see which one you like best.
 
Last edited:
Well if separates is best, we have the option of using our xbox 360 as an extender... although I wanted to get away from that as I've had issues with it handling certain mkvs etc.

Will the i3 540 be enough to transcode any files to the xbox360? Been reading about WHSv2's new features...

Is there any unraid/drobo(scaleable/expandable) raid5/6 type solution for WHS?
 
watanabe said:
Will the i3 540 be enough to transcode any files to the xbox360? Been reading about WHSv2's new features...
Click to expand...
Should be more than enough
watanabe said:
Is there any unraid/drobo(scaleable/expandable) raid5/6 type solution for WHS?
Click to expand...
Not RAID 5/6 but WHS does have the Drive extender feature if you don't know about that. It's basically a RAID 1 + JBOD kind of setup. Similar to a JBOD setup in that you can keep adding different sized drives to the "drive pool" and the storage size increases. I.e 1TB +2TB = 3TB of storage available. It's a RAID 1 in the sense that you can individually set certain folders containing your data (Pictures, Music, Videos folders, etc) and turn on "duplication". From there, whatever file/folder has "duplication" turned on, another copy of that file/folder will be kept on a different hard drive. So in case the original drive dies, whatever data was duplicated will be kept safe.

There's a FAQ on WHS:
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1390750

There is supposedly a way to get MKVs to work on the 360 but I have not tried this myself:
http://support.divx.com/faq/view/supportFAQen107/video_tutorials_-_other?id=6
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top