Noob question on NAS

mattchapman

mattchapman

Gawd
Joined
Dec 30, 2005
Messages
572
Hi
I currently have two PC's. A main rig for gaming and general use and then an HTPC in the living room. All my media is stored on 2x2TB HDDs which are located in my main PC. I access these files on my HTPC via a wired ethernet connection (using W7 Homegroups).

I'm wondering if a NAS is a better solution for me so that my main PC doesn't always have to be on when I'm using my HTPC.

Regarding speed, will a sub $400 2-bay NAS box (think Synology, Qnap) give me similar read/write speeds that I'm getting today with my ethernet connection?

Thanks
 
Is it a 100Mbps or 1Gbps network?

I expect the little 2 bay NAS would be fine for streaming films etc
 
For only 2 hard drives of media, as someone that was in your exact position 3 months ago except with 3 hard drives, I would move the hard drives over to the HTPC. Why? I no longer need to leave both running, rather the HTPC is just kept in sleep mode which consumes 3 watts, and it only wakes up for recordings or when I want to watch TV. I ended up buying another case but it looks better, holds 6 (up to 9) drives, and is an mATX case so it's not huge either. Oh, you also don't need to spend any money beyond a case.

What would a NAS do for you?
- Speed wise it could be close, but it all counts on what NIC's they use and their drivers; some are real hit and miss, make sure to research and check reviews especially on throughput. Realistically, if you are streaming a movie, even 100mbit ethernet works, and most NAS have gigabit, even if it is no where near it's potential
- Money is a factor which has always greatly diswayed me because for $400, I could build a low powered atom and have 10x more functionality.
- On a similair note, functionality is different since my HTPC/fileserver combo also does remote transcoding so my wife and I can watch all our shows/movies on our phones since it is on a Windows OS
- 2 bay NAS is tiny, 4 bay NAS are small but managable if you are willing to go through and not horde data, and anything 6+ is going to be very expensive.

If you aren't good with computers, want something with a tiny footprint, or just want something to plug in and not have to deal with stuff, a stand alone NAS is a good choice. Again, this comes down to easy of use which is what you are paying for.
 
I believe my current ethernet is Gigabit (both motherboards in main PC and HTPC have gigabit LAN and I'm using Cat5e cable).

I guess I could stick the media drives into my HTPC but it still means whenever one PC wants to access the data the other PC would have to be on. Plus, my HTPC has a small footprint today and I'd need a bigger case to stick the drives in as you say.

Thanks for the info.
 
Is there a reason you are accessing your HTPC media for your gaming PC? The was the main reason why I switched over. There are also benefits for an HTPC combo like storage pooling and parity protection ala FlexRAID. Also, unless the NAS you are thinking about will let you put in drives full of data, you may need to backup everything before you plug it in which means if you don't have 2TB of room, you may need to buy another hard drive too.
 
I have movies, pictures and music on my media drives. I do access the music and pictures from both PC's. Only movies from HTPC.
 
There are 2 things you could do here. Build your own NAS box using a small ITX style case, or go the premade route. If you like tinkering with things, I suggest you build your own, Its fun and a great learning experience.
 
I agree with Vengance_01, I was in a similar situation as mattchapman. I had a desktop PC that I wanted to use has a HTPC, but it was running out of space. So instead of upgrading it, adding hard drives, etc. I'm in the process of building a home server system. I had people suggest buying a prebuilt NAS, but for my first run with a server I'm enjoying piecing this one together.

I decided to put together an extra PC, pick up a couple 2TB drives and a copy of WHS 2011. Its taken some time and I've had some issues along the way, but overall I'm glad that I went this way. I'll learn from my mistakes and build a bigger & better one next time!!! :D
 
I went the other route OP, same situation, but I bought a Netgear 4bay ReadyNAS.

I originally had a 2 bay in mind, but you quickly find out if you want storage space and redundancy, you will need at least 4 drives. Otherwise with a 2 bay NAS you would be limited in space to the size of the largest drive. So 6Tb (2x3TB) worth of drives would only net you 3Tb space with redundancy.

With a 4 bay you could have up to ~9Tb of space with redundnacy with four 3Tb drives. Or you can go with four 1Tb drives to start like I did and have ~3Tb of storage with redundancy with the ability to increase over time.

With a two bay NAS once you hit 3Tb you are stuck and to get more space you have to give up redundancy, something you don't want to do.
 
I was in a similar situation about a 2 year ago. I had only a gaming pc with all data on it. I went with a 4 bay NAS but notice very slow network transfer and limit support for devices. I return the NAS and build a HTPC. I am able to share data (video, music, photo,movies, files...etc) with pc and consoles.

For easy setup to share data with PC - NAS
To share data on multiple device - HTPC
 
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