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Flomaster · 2010-09-08, 17:22

Sons of Anarchy season 3 premier was last night and I checked my xbmx tv shows and it looks like Sb grabbed it and sent it to Sab. so yeah I can't watch LIVE tv, but I hate commercials so ever since the DVR days my live tv viewing has been next to nothing.

-=Jason=-

danz0l · 2010-09-08, 20:27

cable_guy Wrote:wow, that all sounds great!

I've just noticed your rig actually, and I wonder if you'll migrate to a whopping great big multi shelf NAS at some point? To save having oodles of drives hanging off your little Revo?

Yes i'm looking into making a fileserver with as many hard drive racks as possible. I've been so impressed with the REVO and its file handling capabilities i'm seriously considering a mini ITX board with an ATOM processor to run it. This cuts down on the wattage as well as making it virtually silent. But i'm still in the planning stages. Either that or get as big a htpc case as i can and have a one box serves all, again with an mini itx ION board and the harddrives within.

The former sounds better though as the family are really in on the revolution now and all want boxes for their rooms.

Quote:How are BBC IPlayer etc? are they in HD?

I've played them in HD and it truly is amazing, you'd never know it was streaming from the internet. However most of the time i settle for SD due to bandwidth allocation to the downloads. They look as good as my freesat though on my Toshiba 42in TV even in SD so i'm happy Smile

Quote:The only thing that annoys me is how the R3600 was £130 and has now become extinct, and the R3610 is £205+

Yes i know what you mean. When i first looked at this i never thought the revo's would be up for the job so never bothered getting them when they were cheap and a plenty. Now they are £200+ due to them being in demand and not in manufacture and its a shame. I was lucky to get the last ones from Ebuyer sub £200 with linux on but now i think it would be cheaper building my own.

I have spent ages on this site

http://www.mini-itx.com/

And i'm sure i'll build my own soon.

cable_guy · 2010-09-08, 21:37

Did your remote control work out of the box?

How come you are worried about your bandwidth allocation? Do you have an ISP where you're limited?

Your comment about it being cheaper to build your own is interesting, would you go for one of the Zotac ION boxes? what rig would you go for just out of interest? I do like the SD card slot in the Revo, I think i'd boot XBMC live from that if I do get one.

Re: your storage solution, Have you looked into getting a pre-built NAS enclosure like a Qnap or a Netgear? If you built a fileserver based on an Atom, what software would you use? I hear Freenas or openfiler are good, or a ZFS based solution like openSolaris? I noticed your 2TB drive is the same one I have but mine's inside WD's external USB caddy. Do you link your big HDD enclosure via USB or eSata?

what is wrong with this forum!? does it randomly not load for anyone else or is it just me??

poofyhairguy · 2010-09-08, 21:51

cable_guy Wrote:interesting point poofy, do you mean USB 2.0's bandwidth isn't capable of playing an uncompressed Blu ray file?

That is right. In fact, it only get about half the job done with my Avatar rip.

poofyhairguy · 2010-09-08, 21:53

danz0l Wrote:Yes i'm looking into making a fileserver with as many hard drive racks as possible. I've been so impressed with the REVO and its file handling capabilities i'm seriously considering a mini ITX board with an ATOM processor to run it.

Mini ITX + Atom + Unraid = One of the best NASes money can buy.

ALWAYS separate your NAS and your HTPC in the longrun - those hot HDs (with noisy fans cooling them) have no business next to your TV.

Trust me I have tried the NAS+HTPC route and it really is unacceptable...

cable_guy · 2010-09-08, 22:02

poofyhairguy Wrote:Mini ITX + Atom + Unraid = One of the best NASes money can buy.

ALWAYS separate your NAS and your HTPC in the longrun - those hot HDs (with noisy fans cooling them) have no business next to your TV.

Trust me I have tried the NAS+HTPC route and it really is unacceptable...

Unraid or Freenas do look good. Interesting that you found it unacceptable, was that because of the noise of the hdd or the fact a hd died next to the heat of the TV, or something else?

For me, this solution is ideal right now due to the fact I already have a large (2TB) external USB drive. If I do get the need for more space in future though I think I would be happy to go NAS.

poofyhairguy · (This post was last modified: 2010-09-08, 22:34 by poofyhairguy.)

cable_guy Wrote:Interesting that you found it unacceptable, was that because of the noise of the hdd or the fact a hd died next to the heat of the TV, or something else?

I found it unacceptable because HDs add:

- Noise

- Heat

- Size

To a HTPC. The best HTPCs are Mini ITX based (or pre-builts like Revos) due to size, but there doesn't exist a good Mini ITX case that can hold and cool two large HDs while playing 1080p without having a small (and therefore loud) fan blasting constantly.

My last HTPC was one where I tried to puts the HDs in the box to avoid a NAS. Ended up having to buy a VERY expensive Antec case to get all 120 mm fans (which is needed to keep the HDs cool while not being too loud) and that beast took up almost my whole mediacenter.

That is why I recommend against combining NASes and HTPCs. By the time you shell out for a decent HTPC case that can hold the HDs and keep them cool quietly you could have picked up a junker old PC and stuck a sata card into it to make a NAS.

When you combine the HTPC and NAS you end up shelling out for all this stuff (like the large aforementioned case) that is useless when you move up to a superior NAS + Frontend setup.

Another reason why to separated NASes and HTPCs? Unraid/FreeNAS don't work with XBMC on the same system. So you end up doing without any sort of parity protection (since no HTPC case can fit enough HDs for a RAID 5), which is unacceptable.

I HAVE wasted this money, so I know. My sig stands as a warning to all to not follow down my path. If you are spending a single dime on something that won't be used in a Frontend + NAS arrangement you are wasting money in the long run...

danz0l · (This post was last modified: 2010-09-08, 22:58 by danz0l.)

cable_guy Wrote:Did your remote control work out of the box?

Yes most of it, the other bits i fixed following this thread

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=60944

Quote:How come you are worried about your bandwidth allocation? Do you have an ISP where you're limited?

I'm with BT and because i download 250gig+ monthly they restrict my downloads to 1mbit between 5pm to midnight. I can't stream HD then Sad

So much for their unlimited plan eh Smile

Quote:Your comment about it being cheaper to build your own is interesting, would you go for one of the Zotac ION boxes? what rig would you go for just out of interest? I do like the SD card slot in the Revo, I think i'd boot XBMC live from that if I do get one.

If i was to build for just a xbmc then yes i would possibily go for a Zotac ION-ITX-F Mini-ITX Motherboard and try for passive cooling.

http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=53

It has nice specs and would likely make a good XBMC system and i like the idea of 10 USB's.

Its a shame there is no IDE on there though or i'd consider coupling it with a 40pin IDE Flash Memory Module like the 1GB IDE Flash Memory Module (with Faster SMI Controller)

http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=16

1gig should be enough to boot XBMC and its a cheaper option than a SSD drive.

But i'm still in the looking stage at the moment.

Quote:Re: your storage solution, Have you looked into getting a pre-built NAS enclosure like a Qnap or a Netgear? If you built a fileserver based on an Atom, what software would you use? I hear Freenas or
openfiler are good, or a ZFS based solution like openSolaris?

I like the flexibility of my own nas type fileserver and would consider ubuntu minimal as i think that would suit my needs. But again i'm researching that. I don't want any sort of raid protection because i simply can't afford the added expense of other harddrives to mirror and the amount i download i guess i'm just going to have to take a chance on harddrive failure.

Quote:I noticed your 2TB drive is the same one I have but mine's inside WD's external USB caddy. Do you link your big HDD enclosure via USB or eSata?

The external case i use supports both but i went with USB as it was originally hooked up to a popcorn hour c200. To be honest the speeds from them through USB are fine for my needs and i can play AVATAR x264 1080P from them without hickup whilst the popcorn hour c200 accesses them upstairs at the same time. Never yet noticed any issue with slowdown or speed on access.

jhsrennie · 2010-09-09, 08:57

poofyhairguy Wrote:I found it unacceptable because HDs add:
- Noise
- Heat
- Size
...

Speaking as a server dude I fully agree with this, and I'd add another agument. I use a NAS (actually W2k3) to store all my media, mail, etc, and this NAS I treat with great caution so it's very stable and keeps my data safe.

On the other hand I install all sorts of rubbish on the HTPC because there's no data on it and if I break it I can quickly reinstall it with no data loss (actually I have never broken it, but my 8 year old niece has :-).

JR

Frozone · 2010-09-09, 09:27

poofyhairguy Wrote:Mini ITX + Atom + Unraid = One of the best NASes money can buy.

ALWAYS separate your NAS and your HTPC in the longrun - those hot HDs (with noisy fans cooling them) have no business next to your TV.

Trust me I have tried the NAS+HTPC route and it really is unacceptable...

I like the idea of unraid, but how do u run programs like jdownloader. Don't wanna run a second pc for downloading.

poofyhairguy · 2010-09-09, 10:21

Unraid is just Linux underneath. Jdownloader is Java, and there is a Linux version on their homepage.

Giesber · 2010-09-09, 12:11

poofyhairguy Wrote:I found it unacceptable because HDs add:

- Noise

- Heat

- Size

To a HTPC. The best HTPCs are Mini ITX based (or pre-builts like Revos) due to size, but there doesn't exist a good Mini ITX case that can hold and cool two large HDs while playing 1080p without having a small (and therefore loud) fan blasting constantly.

I have to disagree. It all depends on your needs. If you want a NAS with 8 HDD's it's probably better to use a seperate PC or NAS enclosure. If you have enough with 2 HDD or maybe even 3 or 4 HDD's you can put it into a HTPC.

But I use my HTPC as NAS as well. But I only have 2 HDD's (software RAID) for storage (and a little one for the OS), which is enough for me. The reason for combining a NAS with a HTPC is that I didn't intend to get a HTPC at all Smile

. It just added a lot of functionality for very little money to my original configuration.

Size isn't a problem. My case measures 264 x 112 x 230 mm, which isn't as small as most ION boxes, but it isn't a big tower either.

Heat is also no problem. It has a tiny fan on the ION chipset, and a tiny fan in the PSU. The HDD temps are 36 °C for the laptop disk with the OS, and 30 °C for the regular disks in RAID. The chipset and CPU temperatures are also acceptable, so there isn't even need for a casefan at the moment.

Noise is another thing. My box isn't very quiet, but as soon as I watch TV I don't hear it anymore. Since it isn't a problem for me I didn't take a look at it yet. If it starts to bother me I can look into it and buy a new heatsink for the chipset or a new fan for the PSU, whichever causes the noise. The case is also high enough for a decent casefan if needed.

So personally I don't think combining a NAS and a HTPC is always a bad idea. In some cases it can be good, in other cases it's probably better to use seperate devices.

Frozone · 2010-09-09, 12:28

poofyhairguy Wrote:Unraid is just Linux underneath. Jdownloader is Java, and there is a Linux version on their homepage.

But jDownloader still needs a GUI. (There working on a server-version)

Can u run every linux program in Unraid, inlcuding GUI?
Then it would be perfect for NAS. But without these Programs, it's a no go for me

CrazyIvan · 2010-09-10, 02:16

Add me to the separate HTPC from NAS group. I have an Antec 1200 (behemoth case but amazing cooling for many drives) Unraid machine that can hold 21 drives whirring away in the basement utility room. Its powered by an Intel Celeron 430. Currently has 8 SATA disks including a 2TB parity drive for 9TB of storage. The release of the ~$100 SuperMicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 cards that add 8 SATA slots was a great breakthrough for mega NAS's. Unraid runs SABnzbd, rtorrent/rutorrent and Sickbeard among others all through web UI's so remote usage is a breeze. Smile

HTPC machines access the NAS over Gigabit Ethernet.

danz0l · 2010-09-10, 09:18

I'm looking to either the antec p183 or p193 for my server case now. They look the business from what i can see.

Whats the benefit of running unraid OS in favour of any other linux flavour ? Is it just the software raid options (which with 5TB of data already would make an expensive option for me to mirror).