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Benefits of NAS:
-Drive pooling
-Parity (protection for drive failure)
-Remove noise and heat from HTPC
-Increase longevity of hard drives by removing them from the case of the better processor and GPU/allowing for louder and better cooling.
-Run background services such as sickbeard, couchpotato, transcoding, ftp server, maybe even a simple webserver with MediaFrontpage running on it without burdening/cluttering your HTPC.
-If you have more than one HTPC on the network, it is much less likely someone will shut down the computer while you are in the middle of watching a movie, as no one will really be bothering the NAS.
-It's fun to build things
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^^^^^^^^^^^^
What that person said.
I have easily:
800+ Movies
100+ Tv Series
1400 Albums
1000's of photos from 2000-2011
Many Scanned Documents
Central Download location for network
All backed up on a unRAID server with Parity protection. I know that when I put something on it its shared amungest the Network and for all practical matters safe.
Of course this isn't a which NAS would I go with, but no matter what you go with make sure it has some kind of user security and keep in mind just because you can pack it to the hilt with space remember what do you do if you simply loose a drive. Data is really cheap, but restoring it isn't.
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The good thing about a NAS is you usually over-size it, so that when you are full of media, you can just add more drives and keep truckin'.
Most HTPC cases just aren't designed for this type of expansion.
I combined mine, and it worked out great. I had 6 TB's of storage in my slim, sleek XBMC box, and it functioned as our home server and our HTPC. Obviously it remained on all the time.
I went through quite some effort to keep the hard drives cool, while not generating too much noise. Its not a difficult problem to solve, but it is an expensive one, and still, its a fine balance.
I have just recently built a home server using an Array R2 case, which can hold up to 6 hard drives, doubling my capacity potential. At the same time, I have reduced the size of our HTPC, and most of all its noise output.
I'd say if you can fit your collection within 2TB, combining them is a good idea. If you are looking into more than that, especially in the future, then a separate NAS is a good idea.
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I might be a little naive here and I don't want to pass moral judgement on anybody but are you guys really paying to have 1000-2000 movies? And it sounds like many of them are HD implying Blu-ray. Wouldn't that cost upwards of $15-30k for that size of a movie collection?
Are people really downloading over 1000 HD movies?
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2011-04-26, 23:06
(This post was last modified: 2011-04-26, 23:20 by crooksy.)
A NAS solution is great for those who require loads of drives and storage space. For the majority of us and those who can't be bothered with the hassle a NAS can be overkill.
I would keep a NAS in mind when you are building your setup and possibly work towards it as you build up your library of content.
There are a lot of alternative solutions/combinations out their that will meet your requirements.
For example my HTPC has an eSATA 2TB external drive connected, which is very silent and very fast and I use this drive for videos only.
For my music and photos I use a PogoPlug Pro (picked it up for $50) which is hooked up to a 1TB USB external drive that is tucked away in another room. The PogoPlug can work over wifi or ethernet and works as a very affordable "NAS type" solution. XBMC can then read the Pogoplug drive just like any other source and while the PogoPlug Pro isn't responsive enough for videos it certainly works very well for music and photos and/or as a backup option for files that are stored elsewhere in your network on shared drives/folders.