NAS/HTPC combo possible?

[gorobei]

I need to set up a long term storage solution for my home use and occasional free lance work. freeNas on ZFS sounds like the more robust option, but I was also thinking of trying to combine it with a Hauppauge HVR2250 tv capture card.

I want to be able to record over-the-air tv at 1080i and edit/transcode with handbrake later for smaller storage. Ideally I would like to have some PVR programmability so I dont have to manually set the recording.

Is this possible with a nas software (freenas or nas4free) or do i need to look into a freeBSD full server setup? Will the HVR2250 have any problems outside of a win environment?

Also what's the minimum cpu power needed for say overnight 2pass handbrake transcoding? Is dualcore enough or do you really want a quad?

Any advice would be appreciated.

 

[Binky]

Wouldn't Win7/Win8 with flexraid or snapraid be the simpler and more direct solution?

 

[gorobei]

ZFS is a better long term solution than raid. it has self repair ability to fix file corruption and avoids raid memory hole.

 

[smitbret]

So what you are saying is that you haven't looked into SnapRAID or FlexRAID, then. I missed the feature that you are after that SnapRAID and FlexRAID don't have.

That being said, ZFS (IMO) is the best file system I've worked with, but for home use ZFS's advantages are not that significant, especially without the use of ECC memory. The options mentioned have some advantages over ZFS that make them more attractive for a home server, especially one that will be occasionally used as a workstation. Power consumption and the ability to use Windows based software are two of the biggest.

Anyway, as far as re encoding overnight, there's no hard and fast rule for CPU requirements. For 1080i/720p programming, a good dual core will be able to process that in a few hours even with some fairly aggressive settings. If you try moving up to a 1080p source with a 1080p destination and have some very aggresive settings, though, you'll be looking at encode times that vary from 6 hours to 36 hours depending on the particular CPU; an i3 will still handle it pretty well, but a dual core AMD FM2 CPU will probably take more than 24 hours.

As a rule of thumb, I always get the most CPU I can afford for any machine that will be doing a reasonable amount of video encoding. You will never regret it.

 

[gorobei]

i had compared zfs and flexraid, flex doesnt self repair.

after looking into snapraid: has repair, similar fault tolerance, better power down during read, and win compatible. im not necessarily opposed to snap but for the most part the zfs penalty on new drives doesnt affect me. i'm looking at 2mirrored+1parity for the work stuff, and 2mirrored (possibly without parity, but burned to optical backup more regularly) for the home stuff.


for my usage, i will be doing most work on either a laptop or full workstation so the nas will be a smaller unit next to the tv. other than editing out commercials in a NLVE, encoding is the only other workload. i dont mind going up to a quad, but because im doing an itx build all the other parts just seem to have inflated the build totals, so i was hoping i could cut just one corner. sigh.

i hadnt considered 1080p, but i do have some blurays that i will eventually want to archive.

 

[piasabird]

1080p is preferred. I think this is because most people hook up their computers to a HDTV to view Internet streaming and YouTube video and the standard for HDTV is mostly 1080p. 4K might become more popular and catch on but the manufacturers will try to hold on to their 1080p standard to keep from upgrading everything.

You can just try both and see how it looks.

Lately I have seen a lot of MITX cases come down in price. However, often ATX can be a bit cheaper for the motherboard or if you plan on using PCIE video or TV/capture cards. Seems a lot of people are not wanting to use CD/DVD/BLUERAY drives.

If you go with a model of a separate file server or NAS encoding box, you don't need an optical drive on the viewing or HTPC box or a large amount of storage either. You could even ditch the hard drive and just use some RAM and a SSD or use a cheaper smaller hard drive to save money like 500 gig range in SATA.

 

[gorcorps]

Good thread, I plan on doing something similar. In my case I don't plan on using it as a HTPC directly, but mostly as a storage server that runs streaming servers like Plex. Given my comfort level I'll probably just run windows though, so snapraid sounds like the best option in my case.

 

[Binky]

Don't forget to seriously consider the type of files you will be storing. A media server (especially 1080p video) typically has a relatively small amount of very large files that don't frequently change. Look at the advantages and disadvantages of ZFS, and think about whether they are overall better or worse in this environment.

For commercials, why an NLVE and not just comskip or showanalyzer with DRVMS toolbox?

 

[gorobei]

the ZFS is for my work files, i suppose i could go stripe for the media files.

 

[smitbret]

the ZFS is for my work files, i suppose i could go stripe for the media files.

I'm not sure what you are saying here. Are you creating different pools from for the media files and another for work files? There's literally no reason to stripe media files since even the least expensive HDD will easily be able to handle multiple HD media streams. All you'll be doing by striping is increase the likelihood of data loss.

 

[smitbret]

Good thread, I plan on doing something similar. In my case I don't plan on using it as a HTPC directly, but mostly as a storage server that runs streaming servers like Plex. Given my comfort level I'll probably just run windows though, so snapraid sounds like the best option in my case.

DrivePool works very nicely with SnapRAID if you want Drive Pooling (obviously) since SnapRAID doesn't do this natively.

 

[gorobei]

I'm not sure what you are saying here. Are you creating different pools from for the media files and another for work files? There's literally no reason to stripe media files since even the least expensive HDD will easily be able to handle multiple HD media streams. All you'll be doing by striping is increase the likelihood of data loss.

with the work files, i'm prioritizing redundancy and minimal downtime.

for the media files redundancy would come after ability to stream and maximizing pool size. if 5400rpm drives can feed multiple streams, then i can live without the stripe bandwidth. i realize most media files are written once and remain more or less untouched for years, so as long as i am archiving regularly i was pondering maximizing the pool size by striping. if this is a bad idea let me know.

it looks like mythtv lists the hvr2250 as compatible on freebsd.