OP
OP
MacB
Lover of things that come in 3's
- Location
- Farnborough, Hampshire
that was my first port of call only to read that they've ceased supporting it
Creating a Home Media and Backup Drive
- Thread starter MacB
- Start date
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that was my first port of call only to read that they've ceased supporting it
Mr Haematocrit
msg me on kik for android
- Location
- Out of the saddle
Worth remembering that although the devices may only take three drives you should buy a couple of spare drives in case one or two fails because performance is dictated by the slowest drive as much as capacity is.
Drive performance continues to develop as such should you wait till you need a new drive you may find they are no longer available.
Drive performance continues to develop as such should you wait till you need a new drive you may find they are no longer available.
Mr Haematocrit
msg me on kik for android
- Location
- Out of the saddle
Have you considered building a whitebox server to suit your needs, run a propper Gigabit network decent amounts of ram and a raid card, your well on your way.. A high performance free os such as BSD, Linux or MacOS and the jobs a goodun
You also end up with better vfm and something which is upgradable.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...inux-based-nas-media-streaming-server-889889/
You also end up with better vfm and something which is upgradable.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...inux-based-nas-media-streaming-server-889889/
jamin100
Guru
- Location
- Birmingham
I have a hp microserver which can be brought for around £100 after cashback.
It has 5 drive bays that you can fill with whatever you like.
I've got mine setup with 8gb ram and 4x 2 TB disks.
I run ESXI and have 4 os's running at the same time.
1 server 2008r2 - this is my live server which handles all my backups from other devices and streams all my media. This is the one vm that's running 24/7/365
The other 3 vm's are used for testing and lab work.
The microserver is very low powered abs quiet. I run mine headless in a cupboard...
It has 5 drive bays that you can fill with whatever you like.
I've got mine setup with 8gb ram and 4x 2 TB disks.
I run ESXI and have 4 os's running at the same time.
1 server 2008r2 - this is my live server which handles all my backups from other devices and streams all my media. This is the one vm that's running 24/7/365
The other 3 vm's are used for testing and lab work.
The microserver is very low powered abs quiet. I run mine headless in a cupboard...
OP
OP
MacB
Lover of things that come in 3's
- Location
- Farnborough, Hampshire
If I'm understanding correctly then that does seem to be the solution a lot of people go with. Basically forget about the wireless aspect of the Superhub, it can be turned off, and then it becomes a single port wired LAN modem, and the reported speeds are impressive. Though one of the attractions of the hub is that it should be able to do away with that extra bit of kit, hopefully the new upgrades will achieve that. In the meantime I have various wireless solutions, it's weird though as the Virgin Superhub is made by Netgear and I have other wireless gear from them that pumps out much better coverage....guess they were hitting a pricepoint or Virgin used some proprietary SW that slowed things.
One thing I should check though, all of the LAN cables I have, apart from the Netgear one, are very old, as in at least 7-8 years.
Regardless you've all been a great help and I have a much better idea of what I can look at and the sorts of questions I need to ask when making my buying decision. The Virgin hub is relatively unimportant, it works well as a wired modem so will always be sufficient if I tack on a wireless solution.
Good point V on having spare drives to guard against future failures and unavailability, I hadn't thought of that one.
David Haworth
Active Member
I've got a netgear readynas NV+ and its been running fine for what seems like years now. 4x1.5 tb drives, accessible on SMB and AFP and plenty fast enough to stream uncompressed bluray rips to my media player (silent pc running xbmc).
Works fine for me and very little hassle.
David
Works fine for me and very little hassle.
David
Not for you MacB but anyone reading this, needing a bit less, Shuttle have entered the market at the home NAS end with their KD20
http://en.akihabaranews.com/120534/review/review-shuttle-omninas-kd20
Get's good reviews so far, though I'd like to wait for some real world reviews. I know Shuttle though, nicely made PCs, had one setup with a mirrored raid, internal through the Bios and it worked.
http://en.akihabaranews.com/120534/review/review-shuttle-omninas-kd20
Get's good reviews so far, though I'd like to wait for some real world reviews. I know Shuttle though, nicely made PCs, had one setup with a mirrored raid, internal through the Bios and it worked.
OP
OP
MacB
Lover of things that come in 3's
- Location
- Farnborough, Hampshire
Interesting Crackle, I'd avoid just as it's new and I don't want to be an early adopter but I'm not sure that something of this ilk wouldn't meet my needs.
I'm still trying to get my head around space required and level of backup. I don't think I need dual mirroring as I intend to have a cloud copy as well anyway. What I can't seem to get is an accurate feel for how many TB my imagined useage would need. It's tempting to look at a 2 bay solution with the ability to plug in or add on more if/when required. Certainly a lot of what I'd like to store would be rarely accessed stuff.
I'm still trying to get my head around space required and level of backup. I don't think I need dual mirroring as I intend to have a cloud copy as well anyway. What I can't seem to get is an accurate feel for how many TB my imagined useage would need. It's tempting to look at a 2 bay solution with the ability to plug in or add on more if/when required. Certainly a lot of what I'd like to store would be rarely accessed stuff.
+1 for the Netgear range of NAS options. Aside from just being reliable there are two good reasons I'd recommend them.
The guys who write the software take an active part in the forums and new releases often take on bug fixes and suggestions. The forums also give great support to beginners and techies alike.
XRAID takes the difficulty out of managing raid, makes it easy to replace failed drives in the future and manages growth well.
Also the units offer lots of software capability which make it easy to serve photos, music and film to a variety of devices.
Well, yes it's new, so unknown but also I thought you were looking higher end because you had some definite needs you'd identified about using it as a DLNA server and this, according to the review, is deliberately limited in it's mappings, to keep it simple.
You've got me farting about with a USB drive in my Netgear router now and trying to get my Samsung telly to see it as a DLNA server. It can see it but can't access it but as I've never tried this before, I probably haven't got something set up right. I'll let you know if I get it to work.
I can report it works. Samsung tv see's the DLNA server and finds the music, videos and pics easily. It also streams them pretty quickly and this is just an old USB disk pluged into the USB port on the router.
Only one quirk. My Samsung seems to lose the internet if you go back to TV and it needs an off/on to get it working again.
Anyway, there you go, you were asking about that weren't you. It's connected via a Linksys homeplug but I'm sure a wireless usb will work too.
Only one quirk. My Samsung seems to lose the internet if you go back to TV and it needs an off/on to get it working again.
Anyway, there you go, you were asking about that weren't you. It's connected via a Linksys homeplug but I'm sure a wireless usb will work too.
MossCommuter
Guru
- Location
- Salford
On this specific point, I tried the official Sony USB dongle in my Bravia telly and the performance was so poor as to render it useless. I switched to a wireless AP and there was a little improvement but still it was not great so I now use Powelrine Ethernet which performs excellently.
On the subject of DLNA (I use rygel server in Ubuntu); this is not supported well by my Sony Bravia telly and requires transcoding of all but a few formats but newer models may do better.
OP
OP
MacB
Lover of things that come in 3's
- Location
- Farnborough, Hampshire
A little more on the space bit folks if I may. So I'm trying to work out what my existing content would require and I'm seeing a variety of numbers for each type of content, for example:-
HD DVD - from 700MB up to 8GB - depending on whether you're storing the entire disk plus extra content and whether or not you are compressing it.
I see the same sort of variables for other content, are there any hard and fast rules based on what I'd like to achieve? ie I wouldn't want to squish a movie into a tiny space if it meant lengthy/complex decoding/translating to be able to watch it.
I'm just reading one review around the first 4TB HDD and the size comparison they give is that it would hold 2000 HD movies, so that would be 2GB per movie.
If you do need to squish stuff up to maximise space then can the decoding SW be on the NAS as well and decode as you download/stream?
HD DVD - from 700MB up to 8GB - depending on whether you're storing the entire disk plus extra content and whether or not you are compressing it.
I see the same sort of variables for other content, are there any hard and fast rules based on what I'd like to achieve? ie I wouldn't want to squish a movie into a tiny space if it meant lengthy/complex decoding/translating to be able to watch it.
I'm just reading one review around the first 4TB HDD and the size comparison they give is that it would hold 2000 HD movies, so that would be 2GB per movie.
If you do need to squish stuff up to maximise space then can the decoding SW be on the NAS as well and decode as you download/stream?
OP
OP
MacB
Lover of things that come in 3's
- Location
- Farnborough, Hampshire
Hmmm, well I think, nice as it might be, the 16TB solution I was contemplating would be severe overkill by quite a significant factor. Even without any form of compression I wouldn't get anywhere near that.
I do want functionality and so I've now shortlisted to the Synology DS213+ or DS713+, both are 2 bay offerings with the main difference being you can add a 5 bay expansion to the latter. However I reckon 2 x 3TB HDDs would cover my needs, allow full mirroring, I'd keep a spare desktop drive to backup on and also use a Cloud store. I aim to spec whichever I choose as high as possible and probably get it professionally installed in a teaching me how to sort of way.
Off to shop around now and will report back.
I do want functionality and so I've now shortlisted to the Synology DS213+ or DS713+, both are 2 bay offerings with the main difference being you can add a 5 bay expansion to the latter. However I reckon 2 x 3TB HDDs would cover my needs, allow full mirroring, I'd keep a spare desktop drive to backup on and also use a Cloud store. I aim to spec whichever I choose as high as possible and probably get it professionally installed in a teaching me how to sort of way.
Off to shop around now and will report back.
