NAS & Home storage - What works?

Izo

Izo

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I'm looking at solutions for home storage / NAS / vid streaming box, maybe with some cloud capability. I'm trying to make it friendly for the wife and kid to use. Budget is sub 1K $ for the hardware, but less if possible.

Mostly it is to be used as a dump off for family photos & vidz, in house streaming server for cartoons and movies for tv / ipad / ps3 / smartphones.

It would be cool if it had some torrent / rss feed capability, perhaps a web admin for it?

A raid setup for data integrity perhaps?

Any other must have features?

What do you guys use - what works? Do you build your own box? Linux? Windows home server? Something else?

Advice appreciated
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Luthair

Lord Nagafen Raider
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I run a plain Linux box with fedora with md to provide software raid.

Really ease of use for non tech people should not be a big concern as they should be using integration points (eg windows, TV box etc)
 
Jysin

Jysin

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Building your own box is definitely the cheapest route, however the most convenient (and what I use) is something like a Synology NAS. It has torrrent capabilities, multiple raid levels, web admin, and dozens of other features above and beyond most home use. They can vary from simple 2 bay drive configuration through 5 bay models. Pricing will vary mostly depending how much actual storage / brand of Hard Drives you end up with.
 
Gnomedolf

Gnomedolf

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I prefer building my own. Get a Bitfenix Prodigy case, put your hardware in it, and throw some drives in there. Get DrivePool for $20 and mirror the drives for redundancy. With Drivepool, you can take your drives out and read them on other computers.

I run iTunes on mine and stream to my Apple tv's, but you can also run Plex or something similar. For cloud stuff, get the free Tonido. Remote access to all your stuff and has free mobile apps. You can also share files along with streaming them remotely. Super simple to setup.
 
Intrinsic

Intrinsic

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Do you have your own streamer? Like a Roku, WD TV Live, etc...

As far as NAS goes, if I was starting over I would check outSmall Net Builder's NAS Chartsand look at something in the middle for Price vs. Performance. Just see if it meets how much storage you think you'll need and the RAID options you want.

The reviews will give you a good idea of the web management capabilities as they vary from good to trash as well as an idea of whether you can set up additional services on the NAS.

I'd probably budget something like: $300 on a 2 bay NAS (not sure if there is a decent 4 bay NAS sub $500), $250 on two 3 TB drives, and then if you needed a streamer for your HD TV or whatever you can spend $90 on a Roku or WD TV box, or build your own NUC box $320 or so.

*edit:This threadhas some good info on streamers
 
Denaut

Denaut

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I am in the market for one too, after looking into building one I finally decided that a pre-built NAS was easier and did mostly what I wanted anyway. The Synology and QNAP are nice but pretty expensive, the D-Link are cheap but pretty crappy. Recently Netgear just refreshed their NAS and I like theReadyNas 102.

The only problem right now is that if you go with the 102 is that it is designed for 2 4GB drives and if you want WD Red drives they only come in 3GB. The 4GB should be out in October, or you could pick up the Seagate NAS drives.
 
Denaut

Denaut

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You could use a Raspberry Pi with RaspBMC on it as a cheap streamer too, it is a bit minimalist but it works and you can just tape it to the back of the TV out of the way using the HDD USB plug on it for power and connectivity.
 
Eomer

Eomer

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Jysin_sl said:
Building your own box is definitely the cheapest route, however the most convenient (and what I use) is something like a Synology NAS. It has torrrent capabilities, multiple raid levels, web admin, and dozens of other features above and beyond most home use. They can vary from simple 2 bay drive configuration through 5 bay models. Pricing will vary mostly depending how much actual storage / brand of Hard Drives you end up with.
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Pretty much this. I have a QNAP box, it works great, took next to no setup, and I barely use half of the features on it.
 
K

Kedwyn

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Qnap is great. Lower end boxes use twonky and more expensive versions can run plex server or a variety of other options.
 
Izo

Izo

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Plex looks very nice, thank you so much guys
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I'm still torn between doing it myself with MSDN Windows something + Plex, and a proprietary box with Plex. Those Qnaps look pretty nice. I'm looking into BitFenix Prodigy and doing the hardware myself as suggested first. There is a special offer on the blue colored version at my local store. Not my favorite color, but it's gonna be stuck on top of a closet or some obscure place anyway. Is there any must have hardware to include beside the usual SSD for OS, HDD's for storage, micro atx mb, intel cpu, ram?

What to get, what to get
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Void

Void

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I quickly realized that I didn't have the technical know-how or the patience to build my own, even though I have plenty of old computers with large cases lying around that I could have used. So I bought an 8-bay Synology, that is expandable with up to two more 5-bay extensions if I really need it. It was pricey, almost $1000 just for the bare box with no drives, but god I fucking love it now. The Synology Raid allows adding more drives, swapping out for bigger ones (although those processes are slow as fuck, but at least you don't have to rebuild from scratch), and most importantly using random sizes to start with until you have the money to buy bigger. It has torrent and newsgroup clients, web servers, music/photo/video servers...all sorts of shit that I never use. I use it to dump all my media on to stream to my HTPC...and to store all of my porn, of course.

You can obviously buy cheaper versions that aren't 8-bay, but if you aren't in the mood to fuck around with building one yourself, you really can't go wrong with a Synology.
 
Tripamang

Tripamang

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No matter what you decide, use FlexRaid for your storage integrity. RAID systems suck, and if a drive fails you can lose the entire RAID's data. Flexraid does parity over top of the file system meaning if you have have two drives fail and you can't restore from parity you only lose whats on those two drives. You select a parity unit (which can be multiple drives) as your parity storage and it just has to be your largest drive unit (You can combine drives in units) It offers numerous configurations on how you can arrange the drives letting you mix and match sizes. It combines with it's storage pool technology to turn all the drives into a single unit (JBOD). Hands down it's the best system out there for a NAS.

I'm not sure how extreme you're looking to go in the future but I use old PC parts I had and this case:http://www.ncix.com/products/?sku=48...nologies%20Inc.

I've been slowly building that out over time by using cheap PCIe add in cards and whatever the best bang for your buck hard drives were available. Mine runs an old AMD Quad core processor and 8 gigs of ram with some cheapo motherboard I found with lots of Sata ports and PCIe ports. I've used countless RAID setups over the years and by far this has been the best I've had.
 
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