Building a NAS

[Blasted]

Hello,

I'd like to build a home-NAS to act as my home's digital hub. I'm a bit in the dark regarding this subject, and a bit confused from all the info I got around the web, with so many different perspectives. I thought a post here could help

My goal is simple, but somewhat intrincate, as it's composed of different aspects. I will try to put it here simple:

1. The NAS must be simple to use. Even though I enjoy doing it, I don't want to go through much hassle to interact with it on a daily basis. I expect to invest some time to configure it to my needs, but after that I want minimal interaction besides the strict use of it; This is of major importance.

2. I want to store Documents, Photos, Music and Videos on the NAS. I will want to access these from my home network directly and eventually from my smartphone or laptop while I'm away from home.

3. I need the NAS to automatically download my favorite tv shows and ocasional movies. I will need subtitles for these. I also have to remotely control what/when these are downloaded.

4. I will have a Chromebox and a Pi at home; The NAS will stream the movies/series/music to them. I also want to display the photos/videos on the TVs they are connected to.

5. I'd like to be able to plug in a USB stick or a memory card to either the NAS or the Chromebox and easily make a backup of the files inside to the NAS directly.

6. The NAS will have to organize my data scrapping metadata for my TV series, movies and music.

Well that's all.. for now As you can see I touch in some varied aspects, and I'm a little worried I might invest and get to a system that falls short in one or two of these aspects... That said, what kind of hardware/software you suggest, or in what direction should I dig to get these kind of results?

Cheers,
Blasted

 

[nsafreak]

Well, you got a lot of our questions out of the way, but there's one major one missing. What's your budget?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

How are your Linux chops? Scripting/Programming?

Most of those requirements are software demands, not hardware demands. And there's a lot of overlap.

What amount of storage are you going to want? (1TB? 10TB? 100TB?) - that actually will dictate a lot of this, since you'll need a case, motherboard, SATA/SAS cards, etc., to make that happen.

 

[Blasted]

I don't have a definite budget yet. Still researching before I can decide.

I believe 5TB would be more than enough for my actual pace of media consumption.

I'm only in the basics on Linux. Dave could you explain what you mean with the overlap?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I don't have a definite budget yet. Still researching before I can decide.

I believe 5TB would be more than enough for my actual pace of media consumption.

I'm only in the basics on Linux. Dave could you explain what you mean with the overlap?

By "overlap" I mean a lot of those requirements are just slightly different uses of the same features.

If you're not handy with configuring Linux servers and scripting, rolling your own NAS is tedious and un-fun. IMO, your best shot is probably something like the Synology DS415play. It's got the CPU power and video transcoding abilities you want, it's compatible with the Chromebox/Chromecast (dunno about the Pi), it's got USB ports and will let you back up your thumb drives, and most of the other stuff you want should be easy enough to do with the included software. (With a little tweaking, it'll allow you to run a bit torrent client to grab new shows. Grabbing the metadata will depend on the media manager you use.)

Given drive prices right now, the sweet spot for $/GB is 3TB drives. With 4x 3TB drives and single-drive redundancy, you'd end up with 12-3=9TB of storage. You could go smaller with 2TB drives and have 8-2=6TB total storage, but you'd be spending almost the same money.

If you're using your NAS as primary storage for music/movies/photos, you'll probably want to back it up as well, probably with a cloud storage service like Crashplan. (Which is what i use; there are others too.) Remember: never only have one copy of something.

 

[Blasted]

I could give a shot at doing this with Linux. Always wanted to know more about it, just never had the time Would it be too hard to learn on the go? Or in worse case could I achieve similar results with Windows?

 

[Essence_of_War]

Would it be too hard to learn on the go?

It's not too hard, it's only a question of what you would find to be an enjoyable use of your time. Some people might find it exciting, some people might find it to be annoying chore if they've already assembled the hardware and they still have to do a ton of work configuring the software before the NAS is useful to them.

 

[smitbret]

With that list and adding in "Ease of Administration", why not just pool storage drives on a Windows 7 Pro or Windows 8 box and just run it headless? It will cost an extra $100 versus using Ubuntu Server but sounds like it would be worth it. Plus, you wouldn't need much in the way CPU and could get by on a Celeron or cheap dual-core AMD APU.

Put XBMC on your Chromebox and RaspPi and read from your SAMBA shares on the Windows box. Scraping would occur on the XBMC boxes instead of the NAS, but if you go to the XBMC forums someone will assuredly walk you through setting up MySQL to centralize the database. In fact, I think PoofyHairGuy can do this and I would be surprised if he doesn't stumble across this thread at some point today. The Pi will be a little choppy unless you overclock it, but is fine as a secondary XBMC location. If you can get it above 900MHz, it will perform better than standalone boxes like WDTV Live. The only issue I have is that the Pi has trouble with raw BD Rips that have sustained peaks over 30mbps when playing back via SMB shares.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I could give a shot at doing this with Linux. Always wanted to know more about it, just never had the time Would it be too hard to learn on the go? Or in worse case could I achieve similar results with Windows?

The basic NAS and PLEX or XMBC (media streaming server) setup is fairly simple and there are lots of tutorials online.

The other stuff like automagically backing up thumb drives might be tougher (I'd probably end up running a python or shell script as a "daemon" that detects the insertion, mounts it, rsyncs it, and de-mounts. But while that's not super-complex, it's definitely not Level 1 Linux either.) Doing it manually would require some SSH and shell abilities, although nothing super-weird.

The reason I recommended a commercial solution is because most of those problems have already been solved. It's usually less work to conform your workflow to the assumptions of an existing product than try to roll your own solution to conform to what you want your workflow to be.

 

[mfenn]

Since it seems that "fancy/cool/high-performance storage system" is not as much of a priority as the media and interactivity features, I agree that a purpose-built NAS product (like the Synology that Dave mentioned) would be the easiest thing to get going and would cover 95% of the use case.

If a small amount of configuration and fiddling about is expected, and the actual storage subsystem are very basic (seems like they are), then a Windows 7/8 box would be fine, though it does add to the overall cost. A Windows box can definitely do everything you want. Perhaps not as elegant of a configuration as a Linux machine, but it will be easier for the average user to get up and running.

 

[Blasted]

Thanks guys.
I will check the synology option to see if it can fit my expectations.
If I choose the PC option, my hardware components would be the same no matter the OS. What components would you suggest for a NAS running these tasks?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Thanks guys.
I will check the synology option to see if it can fit my expectations.
If I choose the PC option, my hardware components would be the same no matter the OS. What components would you suggest for a NAS running these tasks?

A motherboard, a CPU, and a bunch of hard drives. Case doesn't matter, and any 400w+ PSU will be fine.

Any CPU over $100 will be overkill for what you're doing. I'd probably go with a dual core Pentium or an i3. ($75-$125)

The rest is determined by whether you want ECC RAM (C22x motherboard, ~$200) or not (H9x motherboard, ~$80.) There are theoretical advantages to ECC RAM for data integrity, but I'm of the opinion it doesn't matter much for home use. (Except in very narrowly defined cases.)

 

[mfenn]

A motherboard, a CPU, and a bunch of hard drives. Case doesn't matter, and any 400w+ PSU will be fine.

Any CPU over $100 will be overkill for what you're doing. I'd probably go with a dual core Pentium or an i3. ($75-$125)

The rest is determined by whether you want ECC RAM (C22x motherboard, ~$200) or not (H9x motherboard, ~$80.) There are theoretical advantages to ECC RAM for data integrity, but I'm of the opinion it doesn't matter much for home use. (Except in very narrowly defined cases.)

Pretty much this. It's hard to get into specifics without knowing the budgetary constraints.