Where do you keep your media files?

stilgar · Post by **stilgar** » Mon Oct 22, 2012 3:05 pm

Currently all my media (Movies, TVShows, Music) are in my HTPC (inside 3x1TB internal disks and 1x2TB external USB). My XBOX has 160GB HD so I have to delete and ftp stuff all the time. Same goes for my netbook...

Sharing folders in my HTPC would mean it should always stay on. Not very practical since it is in my living room. I have been flirting with the idea of building a NAS server for a while now. I have been playing the FreeNAS in Vmware but did not get the time (or the budget) to go for the real thing.

Has anyone here tried it? Where do you keep your media files? What hw did you use? For media content performance is not an issue. Price and capacity are! Since we 're reusing a 10y old hw here, I believe people in this forum have the right mentality to answer this question

Post by **BuZz** » Mon Oct 22, 2012 3:11 pm

I have a machine running under the stairs that acts as a nas, hosts some services and so on - http://www.exotica.org.uk/mediawiki/fil ... server.jpg - runs ubuntu - quite hefty though. hp micro server things can make good nas' as they can take 4 drives etc and you can run freenas or linux etc.

if your htpc supports wake-on-lan you could run a script on the xbox on startup that sends a wake up signal to your htpc to power it on/bring it out of standby etc - that would save having to have it on all the time.

xbs · Post by **xbs** » Mon Oct 22, 2012 4:10 pm

Like BuZz said, if your HTPC suports WOL it doesn't need to on all the time.

You can build a NAS from an old PC or an atom mobo which are pretty eco-friendly and cheap.

I'm using my ISP router with 2 USB drives

asbo · Post by **asbo** » Mon Oct 22, 2012 4:48 pm

I have a HP ProLiant N40L Microserver, upgraded the RAM to 4GB. And with a custom BIOS that some wonderful people have hacked together you can have 6 hard drives as I do.

Its running unRAID which I highly recommend, although you will need to pay for the plus version if you want more than 3 hard drives. Well worth the money though.

There's a USB slot inside the case into which I've plugged the USB stick that holds the OS, nice and out of the way so it can't get knocked out.

I've basically done what this chap did http://www.avforums.com/forums/networki ... d-nas.html

Four 3.5" hard drives in the quick release slots, one 3.5" in the optical disc drive slot and one 2.5" drive that sits under the optical slot. The 2.5" drive acts as a cache drive so only it has to spin up when you write things throughout the day. It then transfers any data written to array during the night.

asbo · Post by **asbo** » Mon Oct 22, 2012 4:52 pm

4TB of storage in total btw

nidge · Post by **nidge** » Tue Oct 23, 2012 12:31 am

NAS box, made from an old PC running on a VIA chip @ 735mhz. FreeNas v0.7.1 , old I Know, but I'm afraid to update it in case I loose the files

It`s quite low storage compaired with the rest of you guys though, IDE's 2x 160gb, 1x 250gb and 1x 8gb running the OS, I wonder where that came from

I tend to switch mine on when I need it, although it's timed to go off at 2am if idle.

bornagainpenguin · Post by **bornagainpenguin** » Tue Oct 23, 2012 3:52 am

Iomega Home Media Hard Drive, 1TB NAS. Has a USB port on it so if need be I can double that by plugging in my 1TB WD MyBook external drive.

stilgar · Post by **stilgar** » Tue Oct 23, 2012 9:35 am

Yes, WOL has crossed my mind, but in practice my machine would never get any sleep that way

Every now and then some machine would request data and until it was time to sleep again, some other. Also I would not want to stress it (I like my build - pretty quite and small).

I was thinking more of what BuZz has there, impressive mate! I have a spare case that could hold up to 6 disks and having it hidden headless somewhere is a nice solution. I guess that way it could server as a torrent server as well.

xbs the atom approach sounds right. I guess not any heavy lifting for the CPU in such a setup... My router also has USB ports, but it limits me to FAT32 filesystem and FTP access

asbo I wish I could get my hands on such a case but I guess my old one will have to do. I never heard of this "unRAID", I am looking it up now, sounds like RAID5. Pay if you want more than 3 drives? Is that 2 data + 1 spare, or 3 data + the spare? Why did you go with it and not FreeNAS?

What do you guys do for redundancy? I would hate to lose my film collection (http://www.imdb.com/list/DKBqZmy2XiM/). I thought of RAID5. A friend of mine (correctly) argued: RAID is not for Backup. So my current plan is to:
1. Take out the internal disks from my HTPC and use them to build (using my old Midi case and probably an atom mb) a new box
2. Try to figure what OS to use (Linux, FreeNAS, UnRAID) to have the most disk space and some services as well (Bittorrent, Time Machine, DNLA ...)
3. Use my 2TB and my 500GB USB HDs for (offline) backup
My problem is that I have different HD brands, models and sizes and I would like to utilize as more space as possible...

Any advices on OS and specific HW you have used and worked, would be greatly appreciated.

asbo · Post by **asbo** » Tue Oct 23, 2012 10:21 am

stilgar wrote: asbo I wish I could get my hands on such a case but I guess my old one will have to do. I never heard of this "unRAID", I am looking it up now, sounds like RAID5. Pay if you want more than 3 drives? Is that 2 data + 1 spare, or 3 data + the spare? Why did you go with it and not FreeNAS?

The N40L is actually a whole computer rather than just a case. See here a good deal with the £100 cashback. but even better deals are to be had on ebay, which is where I got mine.

unRAID is actually its own thing, similar to other RAID solutions in a way but way better imo. The way it works is you have one drive called a Parity drive, if one of the other drives fails it can recover all the data that was on that drive. Have a read of this.

That would be 2 data + 1 "spare". I think.

I went for it because you get the most space from whatever drives you have. And you can shove any old drives in there. As long as the parity is the same as or larger than your biggest data drive.

So I have:
Parity - 2TB
Disk 1 - 500GB
Disk 2 - 500GB
Disk 3 - 1TB
Disk 4 - 2TB
Total 4TB of space.
And its all safe if one fails or I can take out a small drive and put in a larger one and all the data will be rebuilt onto the new drive.

stilgar · Post by **stilgar** » Tue Oct 23, 2012 2:02 pm

So, if you lose your parity disk you lose your server? I guess, you could use a new disk to rebuild the parity one. What about the USB stick? If your stick fails, won't that mean you need a rebuild one? And if you were using > 2 data disks you need to purchase a new license? Are the data disks usable outside UnRAID (i.e. if I boot a live Linux would I be able to mount disk and use data)?

Since XBMC aggregates sources, I am thinking that having lots of mounts/drive letters is not a problem. I do not need to "see" all my disks as one.

I really like the N40L, does it come with a standard 3-pin PSU? I would have to replace the UK power cord with a European one...

EDIT - Ok, i did a little bit of reading. Drives are usable outside UNRAID and even if you lose 2 disks simultaneously (unlikely) you can mount the rest and get their data (unlike RAID5). I am starting to like it...!

asbo · Post by **asbo** » Tue Oct 23, 2012 2:24 pm

If you parity disk fails then you need to replace it ASAP but you won't loose anything unless a data disk fails as well. When you replace the parity disk it rebuilds itself from all the other disks.

If the USB stick fails you simply download unRAID onto another USB stick and pop it in and off you go. However, and this is this biggest downside to the whole thing, if you purchase the plus or pro version you get a key file that is locked to your USB stick. Since all USB sticks have a unique ID(or they're supposed to anyway). This has happened to a few people but if you contact the company they'll send you another key for free.

If the USB stick fails you will NOT loose any data. Except for any apps or configuration files you have on there.

Yes you can mount the disks in linux and even windows with the correct driver. See here.

Yep the N40L has got the standard "kettle" 3-pin power connector. Chances are they do one that comes with a European cable though?

Another nice thing about unRAID is the addons or apps or whatever you want to call them. For example I have logitech media server(used to be called squeezebox server), pyload and Virtualbox on mine(these all have web interfaces).
It's also got a nice web interface you can manage it all from plus another web interface addon called unmenu that offers even more management stuff. And of course telnet, SSH etc.

I'd suggest giving the free version a try, then if you like it get the plus version. But also read read read, the site, the wiki and the forums, to be sure its for you.

Post by **BuZz** » Tue Oct 23, 2012 2:30 pm

I prefer a standard linux install over specific nas environments, but I wanted to mention that linux does a good job with raid5 etc. Sure the disks all need to be the same size for each raid unit, but you get a lot more performance than something like unraid. It's also available for free. But I generally need more than the out of the box nas solutions offer:

Currently running Ubuntu 12.10 on my fileserver, but it also does audio streaming services for http://www.modland.com (and the xbmc plugin), virtualbox windows development environment, public ftp, backups of remote servers with rdiff-backup, UPnP with video transcoding (mediatomb), torrent backend (deluged), sabnzbplus, web services including proxy I use when im on holiday, database creation jobs (also for modland), lan dhcp, lan dns, printer services for my hp touchpad (pretends to be a hp printer and sends jobs to laser), rsync mirror services for this server, and other things

Just offering alternatives

if you have a limited number of uses the ready made nas solutions are probably fine. worth checking out stuff like freenas also.

Post by **Dan Dar3** » Wed Oct 24, 2012 9:35 pm

A few years ago I upgraded the Xbox HDD to a Samsung 250GB and kept most of my stuff on that (I only keep stuff that I like to see again). Some of it I used to keep on an external USB shared through an UMPC (low power). Recently I got a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Home NAS (3 TB), I meant to write a post on how to connect from XBMC4Xbox to it - what I like about it is that it's obviously a network device, that I can connect the old USB drive through it, and that it draws little power. Also a plus is that it allows for FTP, SMB and uPnPAV.

http://dandar3.blogspot.ie/2012/08/seag ... e-nas.html

Post by **spicemuseum** » Wed Oct 24, 2012 11:02 pm

BuZz wrote:Currently running Ubuntu 12.10 on my fileserver, but it also does audio streaming services for http://www.modland.com (and the xbmc plugin), virtualbox windows development environment, public ftp, backups of remote servers with rdiff-backup, UPnP with video transcoding (mediatomb), torrent backend (deluged), sabnzbplus, web services including proxy I use when im on holiday, database creation jobs (also for modland), lan dhcp, lan dns, printer services for my hp touchpad (pretends to be a hp printer and sends jobs to laser), rsync mirror services for this server, and other things

Mine's quite similar - obvious exceptions being that:
- it's also a Mythbackend with DVB-T and DVB-S2 PCI cards. If it weren't for the latter, I'd be sold on using a little HP Prolient (as ASBO uses), which I think are an excellent option.
- I'm not running 12.10, oh no sir, I can do without that. It's LTS for me all the way, which means I'll be on 12.04 for quite some time.

Post by **BuZz** » Thu Oct 25, 2012 12:53 am

I had upgrade itch. and of course it meant I had to stick a monitor on the machine as it wouldn't boot due to some /etc/fstab mountall issue with my bind mount that worked previously. I'll never learn

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