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WD 8TB NAS as Blu-ray Server?

Ripping Blu-ray's... assuming they aren't copy protected of course, Windows Home Server actually has a MyMovies plugin that will copy disks automatically making it a completely standalone box. For the WD's price you could easily build one and have it much more expandable for the future.
 
Looks like the box uses RAID 0 to get 8 TB. If you lose one disk, all the data will go "bye-bye".

That $1000 price isn't bad, considering that 2 TB disks are still in the $200-each price range.

Edit:
Whoops. WD says they use RAID 5 for the 8 TB version. How do they get 8 TB out of four disks in RAID 5? You'd have to be using 2.7 TB disks. Or five 2 TB disks.

"Big capacity, small footprint - Offered in 2, 4 and 8 TB capacities, this small-footprint four-bay system takes up very little space and provides plenty of storage to go around "
 
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I definitely would be worried about losing all data if one drive went down. You KNOW that it will eventually happen....

As a RAID 5 I think the 8TB version would offer 6TB of storage - correct?
 
KutterMax said:
IAs a RAID 5 I think the 8TB version would offer 6TB of storage - correct?
Click to expand...
Yeah, that'd be the usable capacity with four 8-TB disks in RAID 5. Usually when a RAID array says "8 TB", that means, "8 TB usable space". In this case, I guess not. Their description is a bit confusing, at least for me.
 
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A lot of manufacturers advertise total hard disk space of the media installed yet have different numbers for usable space depending on raid levels.
 
I came across a NAS speed comparison at:

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/component/option,com_nas/Itemid,190


It looks like the WD NAS is fairly far down the list. I'm not sure if the 8TB version is any faster but I'm a little concerned that this may not be fast enough to stream Blu-rays, which really is the main objective.

After a little more poking around at Newegg I came across this Acer Atom based Windows server. Seems like it could be a good option.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-013-_-Product

I could get this and a couple 2TB drives to start. I'd still have room to add a couple more down the road.
 
That's not a bad idea on the Atom one. You may however just want to build your own, especially if you have leftover parts from an old system. The Atom isn't exactly the fastest, and building your own will give you more options to significantly expand the number of drives you use, which may be a consideration if you are storing 25-50GB iso's.

A beefier processor may let you do transcoding on-server also.

WHS installation seemed like Windows XP installation, so not very hard at all.

If you really wanted, you can install the WHS drives on a raid controller and have hardware RAID 5 or 6 too.

Finally, check out the HP MediaSmart EX 490 if you go pre-built. HP has some really nifty custom software.
 
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pjkenned said:
Ripping Blu-ray's... assuming they aren't copy protected of course, Windows Home Server actually has a MyMovies plugin that will copy disks automatically making it a completely standalone box. For the WD's price you could easily build one and have it much more expandable for the future.
Click to expand...

many countries are not as stupid about copy protection as the USA.
But if you do live in the USA it is illegal for you to rip your own blu rays for private use. I am gonna go ahead and give the op the benefit of the doubt and assume he does not live in the USA.
 
my recommendation is... make your own...
1. build a small cheap basic computer in a big case with multiple HDDs.
2. use opensolaris ZFS for ideal storage safety, use freeNAS for ideal ease of use. both are free.
3. use RAID1... raid5 sounds good, but then you want to upgrade and you have to replace ALL disks at once, instead of just adding 2 disks, or replacing the 2 smallest disk with 2 new ones. raid1 saves money in long run.
4. You will need wifi-N or gigE network, I highly recommend gigE with jumbo frames (they are amazing for improving speed of transfer)... On my 5 disk raid6 array on a gigE network I have problem streaming (some movies skip) 1080p/i video files. playing from a local drive works fine, I have no problems with 720p
 
Great feedback. Definitely has me thinking about things. I'm definitely leaning towards some sort of home server setup. I'm not worried about transcoding as I have a couple of i7 920 machines at home that I use for day to day stuff.

I like the small size of the Acer server. I could put it in my office and probably not even notice it. That was my original thought with the WD NAS - nice and small.

I think the next step is to try streaming some 1080p content across my existing network between my office PC and the HTPC rig. If it plays well, then at least my network should be fast enough. If not, it may be back to the drawing board and be forced to consider some local storage options.
 
Hey KutterMax, I'm looking for exactly the same thing, a bluray (or rather mkv) server.

I think the home made idea is the best, have you found anything else besides the Acer?
 
KutterMax said:
Great feedback. Definitely has me thinking about things. I'm definitely leaning towards some sort of home server setup. I'm not worried about transcoding as I have a couple of i7 920 machines at home that I use for day to day stuff.

I like the small size of the Acer server. I could put it in my office and probably not even notice it. That was my original thought with the WD NAS - nice and small.

I think the next step is to try streaming some 1080p content across my existing network between my office PC and the HTPC rig. If it plays well, then at least my network should be fast enough. If not, it may be back to the drawing board and be forced to consider some local storage options.
Click to expand...

If you have 1000mbps you are fine. 1080p streams are not THAT bad. The big issue is storing the files and eventually where do you put the drives. My server is now in a 4U Norco case that I swapped all the fans out to quiet S Flex ones for noise reasons. It sits happily in a closet. It has 15 drives in there at the moment mostly because I use Raid 6 + a hotspare or Raid 1 (lots of data to lose).

Once you go dedicated NAS its hard to go back. My main PC uses 2 SSD's now and zero mechanical drives. Everything is quiet!!!
 
pjkenned said:
If you have 1000mbps you are fine. 1080p streams are not THAT bad. The big issue is storing the files and eventually where do you put the drives. My server is now in a 4U Norco case that I swapped all the fans out to quiet S Flex ones for noise reasons. It sits happily in a closet. It has 15 drives in there at the moment mostly because I use Raid 6 + a hotspare or Raid 1 (lots of data to lose).

Once you go dedicated NAS its hard to go back. My main PC uses 2 SSD's now and zero mechanical drives. Everything is quiet!!!
Click to expand...

Wow, that sounds like a beautiful setup. Off topic... but do you do any online backup? I've used Carbonite with my main system but I don't think their service covers NAS.
 
JAG87 said:
Hey KutterMax, I'm looking for exactly the same thing, a bluray (or rather mkv) server.

I think the home made idea is the best, have you found anything else besides the Acer?
Click to expand...

I'm still looking around but the little Acer unit looks nice.

I did try streaming a high bit-rate file across the network tonight from another PC and everything playing without any glitches - so network speed should be fine...
 
KutterMax said:
I'm still looking around but the little Acer unit looks nice.

I did try streaming a high bit-rate file across the network tonight from another PC and everything playing without any glitches - so network speed should be fine...
Click to expand...


You know, after all I'm not too fond of it. It only supports 4 drives, and the OS still needs to go somewhere. I've been researching all night, and I think I am going to grab a silverstone Kublai 02 case which can get up to 12 hot swappable 3.5" slots using extra 3x5.25 bay adapters, and I'm going to use an Atom itx board. I'm just trying to find out if the 945 atom boards support port multipliers, so I can get 2 cards with 5 sata outputs, and have 10 ports.

Considering I already have almost 6 TB of HD stuff, I think that would be a lot more future proof. And I can install Windows on it and manage shares however i want.

Cost isn't that much, case is like just over $100, 2 more bays are $60, atom board is less than $100, a psu is no more than $100, and the two port cards are another $100. Same price as the Acer, retarded amount of storage 🙂

What do you think?
 
If you aren't using at least raid 5, then you will probably want to use duplication in WHS. It isn't raid 1, but essensially eats space like raid 1 (i.e. you basically have [physical capacity/2] = effective capacity minus 30GB for WHS OS partition).

You may want to consider doing like a lower power core 2 duo board with some PCIe ports for a decent raid card. I got a Gigabyte P45 board cheap because it had PCIe ports for raid cards + dual gigabit NICs. Sure it was more than an Atom board but even with Raid 6 + hotspare I'm losing much less capacity for fault tolerance (1.5TB drives).
 
JAG87 said:
You know, after all I'm not too fond of it. It only supports 4 drives, and the OS still needs to go somewhere.
Click to expand...
The Acer is a Windows Home Server box. The OS takes a 20 GB partition on the first (System) disk. The rest of the disk and all other attached disks are devoted to data storage (and folder redundancy if you wish).
 
pjkenned said:
If you have 1000mbps you are fine. 1080p streams are not THAT bad. The big issue is storing the files and eventually where do you put the drives. My server is now in a 4U Norco case that I swapped all the fans out to quiet S Flex ones for noise reasons. It sits happily in a closet. It has 15 drives in there at the moment mostly because I use Raid 6 + a hotspare or Raid 1 (lots of data to lose).

Once you go dedicated NAS its hard to go back. My main PC uses 2 SSD's now and zero mechanical drives. Everything is quiet!!!
Click to expand...

1000 mbps only removes the actual network connection (in terms of bandwidth, not necessarily latency) from the equation; you are not going to be able to read off files that fast from that target machine.
And when you are opening a file type that was not designed for streaming (for example, playing an MKV), your player is highly unlikely to cache the data. So you can end up with skipping.

I just keep my movies on the file server, and then I copy the one I want to to watch to the HTPC before playing it from the local drive (and delete it I am done). Since I have a gigabit ethernet connection copying is really fast.
 
taltamir said:
you are not going to be able to read off files that fast from that target machine.
Click to expand...

The only time I had an issue was when the Realtek NICs were not staying at 1gbps and moving to 100Mbps. Reading files at 1000mbps minus overhead is not really an issue with hardware raid 6 and drives that can do sequential reads of over 100MB/s each (even on the Adaptec 31605 the array in raid 6 is about 700MB/s read 400MB/s write). Sure there is some latency, but I just haven't seen skipping even while adding a new disk to one of the Raid 6 arrays and having that build. If I saw skipping I might copy locally, but blu-ray content is fine.
 
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