[shabuboy]

+1 on WD NAS devices. I have an older model but still works out fine for me and my needs.

[BeesKnees]

I am deeply suspicious of WD products in this space. People always seem to be complaining that their products are substandard. However I have not used one myself.

smallnetbuilder.com has good reviews and I would go there before I bought anything along these lines.

Back in my computer tech days when a customer came in with a failed HD the joke always was before opening it up is what model of WD is it? That was 20 years ago and they may have figured out QC now I do know that the only computer I have had with a failed HD was a notebook with a WD (5ish years ago). Coincidence? Maybe.

WD can't be all bad or they would not still be in business. I won't buy one on purpose because of my experience with them. Some people believe that all brands are golden but I have never had a good Linksys product either.

[Tinwarble]

I have several WD NASs.



A 8TB EX4, a 8TB DL2100, a 2TB MyCloud and a 2TB MyBook (all except the MyBook have RED drives) and haven't had any issues (knock on wood).

[speedwell68]

Right, upgrade was the wrong word. HTPC runs great, just wondering if I need to store my files somewhere else so that my HTPC doesn't always have to be on...

This was my exact desire too. All I did was got myself an old Acer Revo R3600 for £30 off of eBay. Then installed Lubuntu 14.04 LTS on it (whilst I am proficient with the Linux command line others in the house aren't so I went for something that could be operated by anyone, otherwise just install Ubuntu Server) and setup two NFS shares. The first share was for my Music and was on the Acer's internal 160GB HDD. The second share was for video files on a large external HDD and was split into folders for TV and Movies. Then I just added MySQL and the job was done. I have my music and video on a very cheap and reliable 'server' and my 4 Raspberry Pis work seamlessly with it. I subsequently upgraded the server from 2GB to 4GB, just because, it seemed to help with video encoding and am about to add a single 500GB external HDD just for TV shows, I honestly don't watch many TV shows leaving 2TB purely for movies. The additional 500GB HDD and ram upgrade were gleaned from a scrap Laptop.

[Rickt1962]

Right, upgrade was the wrong word. HTPC runs great, just wondering if I need to store my files somewhere else so that my HTPC doesn't always have to be on...

This was my exact desire too. All I did was got myself an old Acer Revo R3600 for £30 off of eBay. Then installed Lubuntu 14.04 LTS on it (whilst I am proficient with the Linux command line others in the house aren't so I went for something that could be operated by anyone, otherwise just install Ubuntu Server) and setup two NFS shares. The first share was for my Music and was on the Acer's internal 160GB HDD. The second share was for video files on a large external HDD and was split into folders for TV and Movies. Then I just added MySQL and the job was done. I have my music and video on a very cheap and reliable 'server' and my 4 Raspberry Pis work seamlessly with it. I subsequently upgraded the server from 2GB to 4GB, just because, it seemed to help with video encoding and am about to add a single 500GB external HDD just for TV shows, I honestly don't watch many TV shows leaving 2TB purely for movies. The additional 500GB HDD and ram upgrade were gleaned from a scrap Laptop.

How many Watts does your homemade server use ?

[Rickt1962]

I am deeply suspicious of WD products in this space. People always seem to be complaining that their products are substandard. However I have not used one myself.

smallnetbuilder.com has good reviews and I would go there before I bought anything along these lines.

Back in my computer tech days when a customer came in with a failed HD the joke always was before opening it up is what model of WD is it? That was 20 years ago and they may have figured out QC now I do know that the only computer I have had with a failed HD was a notebook with a WD (5ish years ago). Coincidence? Maybe.

WD can't be all bad or they would not still be in business. I won't buy one on purpose because of my experience with them. Some people believe that all brands are golden but I have never had a good Linksys product either.

Been at this since the 70's back in the Day WD's where bad. The past 20 years I replace a lot of Seagates compared to the others http://lifehacker.com/the-most-and-least...1505797966

[speedwell68]

Right, upgrade was the wrong word. HTPC runs great, just wondering if I need to store my files somewhere else so that my HTPC doesn't always have to be on...

This was my exact desire too. All I did was got myself an old Acer Revo R3600 for £30 off of eBay. Then installed Lubuntu 14.04 LTS on it (whilst I am proficient with the Linux command line others in the house aren't so I went for something that could be operated by anyone, otherwise just install Ubuntu Server) and setup two NFS shares. The first share was for my Music and was on the Acer's internal 160GB HDD. The second share was for video files on a large external HDD and was split into folders for TV and Movies. Then I just added MySQL and the job was done. I have my music and video on a very cheap and reliable 'server' and my 4 Raspberry Pis work seamlessly with it. I subsequently upgraded the server from 2GB to 4GB, just because, it seemed to help with video encoding and am about to add a single 500GB external HDD just for TV shows, I honestly don't watch many TV shows leaving 2TB purely for movies. The additional 500GB HDD and ram upgrade were gleaned from a scrap Laptop.

How many Watts does your homemade server use ?

2w on standby
22w at idle
30w maximum

TBH it hardly does any work, the fan only ever kicks in when encoding multiple files. Also all four of my Raspberry Pis have ext HDDs as their Storage partitions, so utilising disk caching the cache will take about 15 minutes to cache an entire 4GB MKV at which point the server falls idle again.

[BeesKnees]

Been at this since the 70's back in the Day WD's where bad. The past 20 years I replace a lot of Seagates compared to the others http://lifehacker.com/the-most-and-least...1505797966

That is very interesting. I have never had a Seagate or a Maxtor go bad. I would not trust an Iomega/Lenova a third of the distance I could throw them. I have had a 60 percent fail rate with their NAS/USB devices.

I am glad WD seems to have turned it around. I may have to adjust my thinking. I am old so it may take me a few years. lol

[Tinwarble]

http://www.computerworld.com/article/287...enter.html

[katsup]

Backblaze should not be used when determining reliability of different hard drive manufactures.

http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/6028/d...index.html

[speedwell68]

I have been using hard drive based PCs for nearly 30 years and I have had an HDD fail once. It was a 320GB Seagate, but in fairness that machine had been dropped from quite a a height. It took a while for the thing to actually fail though. I have no brand loyalty when it comes to HDDs, I am currently rocking drives by Toshiba, Samsung, Hitachi and 5 different Seagates.

[BeesKnees]

Backblaze should not be used when determining reliability of different hard drive manufactures.

http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/6028/d...index.html

Good read. That makes much more sense. Conditions are everything.

[Rickt1962]

Been at this since the 70's back in the Day WD's where bad. The past 20 years I replace a lot of Seagates compared to the others http://lifehacker.com/the-most-and-least...1505797966

That is very interesting. I have never had a Seagate or a Maxtor go bad. I would not trust an Iomega/Lenova a third of the distance I could throw them. I have had a 60 percent fail rate with their NAS/USB devices.

I am glad WD seems to have turned it around. I may have to adjust my thinking. I am old so it may take me a few years. lol

Hummmmm Well having a box load of Seagates that went BAD the past 10 years with NO WARRANTY Never again will trust them.............. Done with them !

[teki4u]

WD My Cloud 4TB Personal Cloud Storage - NAS (WDBCTL0040HWT-NESN) at walmart for around $ 135.00
I purchased 2 of them one for home the other my Vacation home so you don't have to use all that energy with a FULL PC operating
I would go with the Raspberry PI 2 using OSMC its very easy to use. Most TV's have USB jack and that will power your PI
And when shopping for TV's try and get the ones that support CEC ! So the TV remote will work on your PI

P.S. Don't forget to upgrade your network from 10/100 Ethernet to 10/100/1000

Western Digital is far better then Seagates ! I have a drawer full of failed hard drives

This would be the way to go for OP. Though i would rather get the new pi's with 1gb of ram (i don't own them. i'm android fan so i got an amlogic box and one chromebox)
About WD products i guess some have had better luck than others. I have 3 broken 2.5" hdd WD Blue from laptops and one 1tb WD My Passport that got corrupted and not even low level format can fix that thing. So now i go HITACHI or HGST all the way not even Seagate.

Here some useful videos to great reviews about WD Nas and others