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Hi all I'm looking for your opinions on my current situation and impending upgrade possibilities.
I currently have a 3tb usb external hard drive attached to a laptop I leave on most of the time streaming content to a Rasperry Pi running Raspbmc. The setup works perfectly but the hard drive is soon to be full.
So do I buy a second hard drive of similar size and do the same thing, get a bigger hard dive and transfer everything to that or maybe buy a NAS. I'm sure I'll be able to figure out transferring watched statuses etc once I've decided on and got the setup running.
Another option would be to plug the hard drive into the Pi and have the laptop acess it over the network rather than the other way around.
What would you do?
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helta
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NAS. Why bother having stuff plugged in all over the place?
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T800
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Depends what your future plans may be. If 3TB is enough then plug it into the pi or get another pi and use that as the server. Or if you plan on wanting more space build/buy a NAS.
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If I were to plug the hard drive into my current Pi could i still access it from a windows laptop and iPad?
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T800
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With enough playing about yes you could. You could set up SMB/NFS sharing for windows and AFP for the iPad.
You may be asking for your Pi to do too much though. Try it.
In four of my friends set ups we just set up a seperate Pi with HDD's attached, that Pi does all the downloading too.
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PatK
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Once the collecting bug hits you..... the drives quickly fill up magically. NAS is forward thinking.
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2015-01-23, 20:43
(This post was last modified: 2015-01-29, 14:56 by UnderWaterHound.)
I'm tempted with a NAS or Pi as a NAS but I'm concerned with my current Pi's performance with HD files shared from the laptop and if it would be the same with these options. I'm currently trying Samba options as I only need to send files to the Pi's storage and not stream from it.
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Is 1080 content less likely to stutter when played from a NAS than from a hard drive connected to a laptop?
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It shouldn't stutter from either, unless the machine is overloaded or you're streaming over a (weak-ish) wireless connection.
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It's a wired connection at both ends. I suspect then that the laptop or the router isn't up to the job.
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After about 3 years, with all my htpc's hardwired, I found that I was buffering a lot during playback. The weird thing was that download speed was good, but lan speed was terrible. I finally hunted down the trouble, which was my router. Replaced router and all the speed and buffering problems have gone away.
On the storage question: If you plan to continue to collect media, it is best to look at a NAS for your storage. Everyone goes through the same process, add more drives, add externals, add usb's till finally you come to your end game of a NAS. Plan according to your future needs and build for it slowly. My Nas is in my sig for info on what I ended with.
