Need NAS for Movie Storage - Recommendations?

[gigahertz20]

I've already used the search feature in this forum and found a few good NAS devices (links below) but which one would you recommend and what else should I look at?

I want some place to store all my movies and I want to be able to access them anymore in my house from any computer or device. My collection is getting bigger and my 2TB WD Elements USB 2.0 drive is already full along with my 500GB portable drive. I have a WD TV Live and a Popcorn Hour A-110 media player in my house and I currently transfer the movies to my portable hard drives first then plug them into one of the units to play the movie back, it's a pain.

I already have a built in Gigabit network in my house so I don't need to worry about speed or wires.

I was looking at the NAS devices linked below, the last one is a cheap one but it might suit my needs. A reviewer for the 3TB WD My Book Live says he is using his for the same thing I will be using mine for and it works great, so maybe the 1st two NAS devices linked below are overkill for me? The only thing that sucks for the My Book Live though is no upgrading the storage. Once it fills up you will have to buy another......so I don't know.


($350 after rebate) HP StorageWorks X310 Intel Atom Dual Core (1.6GHz) 2GB Memory 1TB Data Vault 3 open bay, Windows Home Server
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...&SID=u00000687


($400) Acer Aspire Easystor AH340-U2T1H, Windows Home Server w/ Intel Atom 1.6Ghz 2GB DDR2 2TB installed (3 open Bay, Hot-Swappable)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-014-_-Product

($360) Synology DS411J Diskless System DiskStation 4-bay NAS Server for Small Office and Home Use
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-066-_-Product


($200) Western Digital My Book Live 3TB Ethernet Black Network Hard Drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-880-_-Product

 

[imaheadcase]

You can prob build something with WHS for the same price around $300-400. I say that because most WHS systems you buy have limited hardrive space to upgrade.

You will quickly fill up a WHS one you have one. I had to go through 2 cases to get the one i needed for space because i kept thinking i would have enough.

The case is the most important part of windows home server purchase.

Get a case with lots of HD bays, a cheap micro atx motherboard /w graphics/nic, single/dual core around 2ghz, 4 gigs of ram. Good to go.

 

[Emulex]

old poweredge SC420 : $0-25 (free if you are in atlanta )
drives
raid card (optional)
freenas/opensolaris/openfiler

DONE.

 

[decrescendo]

I went through this same line of questioning just recently. I still haven't bought or built anything but, from what I gathered, it was going to be more cost-effective to build something with a full OS that was big enough to expand.

I feel like some of these pre-built NAS boxes (Synology, etc.) are so expensive already and they don't even include the disks. And, after you have the disks, you are running their NAS OS and not a full blown WHS or Win7 instance.

I feel like I'm leaning towards building a complete (headless) Win7 machine because it'll give me a lot of room and the flexibility of a full-blown OS. I would imagine a custom-WHS build would be "second place" and a pre-built WHS would be third.

Just my two cents. I'm definitley no expert in any of this, that's for sure. I'd like to hear what you decide on though.

 

[abaez]

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-charts/price

I was looking at a NAS but decided just to get a large tower - Corsair 700D. Not only does it look great, but it's got room for like 12 drives.

 

[decrescendo]

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-charts/price

I was looking at a NAS but decided just to get a large tower - Corsair 700D. Not only does it look great, but it's got room for like 12 drives.

A man after my own. I just couldn't justify the price for the 4-bays when they didn't even come with drives.

 

[Zap]

Not sure about newer devices, but older consumer NAS boxes were pretty slow.

I just couldn't justify the price for the 4-bays when they didn't even come with drives.

Newegg's Memorial Day Weekend Sale had the Acer WHS box bundled with four 2TB drives for a total of 8TB, for $550. Not too bad. At $70 per drive on a hot deal, $280, plus $100 for the OS. That leaves $170 for a quad hot swap tiny cube with 120mm fan, plus Atom motherboard with four SATA ports (no mean feat since chipset only supports two).

 

[decrescendo]

Not sure about newer devices, but older consumer NAS boxes were pretty slow.



Newegg's Memorial Day Weekend Sale had the Acer WHS box bundled with four 2TB drives for a total of 8TB, for $550. Not too bad. At $70 per drive on a hot deal, $280, plus $100 for the OS. That leaves $170 for a quad hot swap tiny cube with 120mm fan, plus Atom motherboard with four SATA ports (no mean feat since chipset only supports two).

Wow that's not bad at all.

 

[gigahertz20]

Wow that's not bad at all.

Deal is still running apparently until 6/6....the only thing is alot of people said in the reviews on Newegg that the Mcafee Antivirus is a real pain to get rid of but several people posted info. on how to get rid of it so no big deal.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboD...t=Combo.658092

Hmmm $550 for WHS/NAS with included 8TB of storage, what do you guys think? I could build my own box and I could get a free copy of WHS which would save, but I'm not sure what parts/prices. I guess I'll have to spec. out the prices/parts later when I have time.

 

[gigahertz20]

I went through this same line of questioning just recently. I still haven't bought or built anything but, from what I gathered, it was going to be more cost-effective to build something with a full OS that was big enough to expand.

I feel like some of these pre-built NAS boxes (Synology, etc.) are so expensive already and they don't even include the disks. And, after you have the disks, you are running their NAS OS and not a full blown WHS or Win7 instance.

I feel like I'm leaning towards building a complete (headless) Win7 machine because it'll give me a lot of room and the flexibility of a full-blown OS. I would imagine a custom-WHS build would be "second place" and a pre-built WHS would be third.

Just my two cents. I'm definitley no expert in any of this, that's for sure. I'd like to hear what you decide on though.

I think I'm going to build my own after reading a bunch online and I want to use the new WHS 2011 that was just recently released as well. I'm gonna have to read more and figure out what kind of case/motherboard/PS to use.

The Acer deal that is going on until 6/6 though is pretty good, full WHS machine with 8TB of storage for $550....pretty nice. If it had WHS 2011 I would probably just go ahead and buy it but since I'll be using whatever I buy/build for years to come to store/backup everything I may as well use the latest version of WHS.

 

[aigomorla]

I ended up recycling a 2p server for Nas Duty on Windows server Enterprise.

4 drives is just not enough storage for me in the long run.

4 drives means in raid5, your going to only get 12TB /w 3TB drives, thats even if your NAS unit can support it.

If you were to build one, you could get one with a pci-e slot for future upgrades that would allow more then 4 drives...

So my recomendation is that you build one, unless u really see yourself not needing scalability on a NAS unit.

 

[gigahertz20]

I ended up recycling a 2p server for Nas Duty on Windows server Enterprise.

4 drives is just not enough storage for me in the long run.

4 drives means in raid5, your going to only get 12TB /w 3TB drives, thats even if your NAS unit can support it.

If you were to build one, you could get one with a pci-e slot for future upgrades that would allow more then 4 drives...

So my recomendation is that you build one, unless u really see yourself not needing scalability on a NAS unit.

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking about doing. Most motherboards will do Raid 5 right? I don't need to buy a separate Raid card or anything right? I played around with Raid years ago but haven't messed with it in a long time so I'm not that knowledgeable on it.

 

[poofyhairguy]

If you are building one consider Unraid. It basically IS the best media server OS. It lets you mix and match drives like WHS (and unlike RAID), but it protects data using way that saves much more space than WHS. I have two 10+TB (ten or more bays each) Unraid boxen and its great for media.

 

[gigahertz20]

If you are building one consider Unraid. It basically IS the best media server OS. It lets you mix and match drives like WHS (and unlike RAID), but it protects data using way that saves much more space than WHS. I have two 10+TB (ten or more bays each) Unraid boxen and its great for media.

Hah, I was doing some searching on Unraid and found your post on the XBMC forums.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=84833

I saw that in your signature you run sabnzbd on your Unraid server. How hard is it to setup sabnzbd with the Unraid server OS? I googled it and it seems like you have to go through alot.

I wish WHS would just have some kind of better storage protection scheme then file duplication...I mean come on, a big company like Microsoft and the best they can do is file duplication which causes you to lose 50% of your storage space if you enable it...GTFO.

I really would like to use WHS to backup all the computers in my house and it's Windows so I'm familiar with it plus I can get a free copy of it through a friend while Unraid would cost like $70 or so for the plus version.....but I want to be able to easily expand to more drives in the future and the file duplication function in WHS wastes so much space compared to Unraid, where you only lose a small fraction of your storage space to parity.

I'd like to have the best of both worlds, but I guess you can't. Hard decision. Right now my collection is relatively small compared to most people, I only have around 2.5TB or so of media files but it will only grow larger in the future. Do you really think Unraid is the best choice for me?

 

[Yellowbeard]

I personally have had VERY good service from my FreeNAS build. Rock solid for almost 5 years now. In fact, I am in the process of upgrading my HDDs and moving from the older FreeNAS 7.* to the newer 8.* as I type this. I'm also heavily considering moving from UFS+RAID-5 to ZFS+ZRAID.

 

[poofyhairguy]

I saw that in your signature you run sabnzbd on your Unraid server. How hard is it to setup sabnzbd with the Unraid server OS? I googled it and it seems like you have to go through alot.

It is easy thanks to this shell script:

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=12546.0

I wish WHS would just have some kind of better storage protection scheme then file duplication...I mean come on, a big company like Microsoft and the best they can do is file duplication which causes you to lose 50% of your storage space if you enable it...GTFO.

Unraid builds on Linux's great software RAID. In fact, Unraid is basically non-striped RAID 4 (which is perfect for media).

Do you really think Unraid is the best choice for me?

Unraid is perfect for media because its fast enough for any media file (I have tested extensively), it allows for mixing and matching drives, and only uses one drive to protect an array up to 20+ drives. I think its the best media server choice for anyone.

It hurt me to pay for it at first (when there are so many free options like FreeNAS) but int he end nothing else gives you what Unraid can. All other solutions are way too much for a mediaserver (ZFS) or too little.

 

[freegeeks]

I have a Drobo FS with 5 x 2TB. I'm happy with it. If I would be in the market for a NAS today, I would go for a Synology DS1511+ because of the expansion options (up to 45TB)

only drawback, it's expensive...

 

[gigahertz20]

I have a Drobo FS with 5 x 2TB. I'm happy with it. If I would be in the market for a NAS today, I would go for a Synology DS1511+ because of the expansion options (up to 45TB)

only drawback, it's expensive...

Hah, yeah right that is crazy expensive. So much cheaper just to build one, which I will probably do.

 

[kmmatney]

I went through a few iterations of trying to get FreenAS and Amahi to work for me, but in the end, I'm very happy with WHS, running on a cheap PC I made mostly with spare parts. It's been running flawlessly, and the automatic backup feature is great. I like the file duplication feature - you can decide which folders get duplicated and which ones don't, so you can use 2 drives more efficiently than RAID 0. Besides backups, their are other features, like the ability to log into the system (ans thus any PC in my house) remotely from anywhere. Because its windows, it can do things a NAS cannot, such as sharing my scanner across all PCs in the house (via remote desktop).

 

[gigahertz20]

For anybody here that uses Usenet and is not a super heavy downloader, 1TB block for $50 deal going on just for today 6/7.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2170037

 

[Chaoticlusts]

Thought I'd throw in a vote for freenas

I've been using it for a few years just moved up to 8.0 recently it's sooooo much easier to deal with now had a HDD die in my array a few weeks back replacing it while a little bit of a pain to find out ended up being extremely simple and if I have to do it again will take no time (like a lot of open source software stuffs easy after you've done it the first time)

but hell the entire system running my 8drive RaidZ2 (like Raid6) array cost me about $250 (not including HDD's of course) and that was bought about 3 years ago...price wise it really can't be beaten

That being said I'm sure there's a lot of ease of use arguements to be made for pre-built NAS's (haven't used one myself) if you can afford one (which is a big if)