Login at Kodi Home

dreameer111 · 2011-01-04, 22:01

I currently have an asrock ion 330 in my living room with xbmc streaming all my movies from my windows home server computer in the basement. The only thing I like about windows home server is that it see's everything as one big hard drive. I was wondering if there's a better solution to stream all my movies from?

What operating system / setup do you guys use?

p.s I have about 9tb of music, pics, movies, etc. that I stream to my xbmc machine.

darkscout · 2011-01-04, 22:04

0) What is your budget?
1) What will it be used for? JUST XBMC Movies, TV shows, etc? Home Videos, Photos. "Irreplaceable" stuff?
2) How much redundancy do you want? If you lose a drive are you OK with losing a chunk of movies? If you lose 3 drives are you ok with losing everything?
3) How much do you plan on expanding in the future?

bmcclure937 · 2011-01-04, 22:07

I personally use, and am an advocate for, FreeNAS. In the coming months I will be upgrading my FreeNAS (expanding storage) and will be preparing for streaming more and more 1080p content to my HTPC. Currently, I am not running services such as SABnzbd, SickBeard, or Couch Potato on my FreeNAS... but that is my plan for the future.

Right now, my FreeNAS is running with a 3x1TB RAIDZ and another 1TB standalone drive. I use the box as a dedicated torrent and media server.

Others on the forum will recommend Flexraid, UnRAID, etc. It all boils down to personal preference in the long run! Big Grin

**CASHMON3Y** · 2011-01-04, 22:22

I personally use Ubuntu 10.10 server with Samba, sabnzbd, couchpotato, etc. Works really nice once its alll set up properly. Also running a 3x1TB RAID 5.

poofyhairguy · 2011-01-04, 23:02

For a simple mediaserver- Unraid Unraid Unraid

Nothing beats its "I just threw in a random HD and it perfectly works" ease of use. You get the "one big hard drive" of WHS, but instead of WHS duplication you get one disk parity. What that means in laymen terms is one disk in your entire array protects your data from a disk going bad. With WHS one disk only protects one other disk.

But if your NAS needs to have important stuff on it - aka financial documents that if you lose the IRS is gonna make you their bitch- make a ZFS server.

bigdog66 · 2011-01-04, 23:52

unraid user here

**The-Boxhead** · 2011-01-05, 00:02

or just by a QNAP Smile

bmcclure937 · 2011-01-05, 00:08

haha! at least you got one representative for a different platform so far... probably not what you wanted. Honestly, it all depends on your needs and what you want to do (or what you have time to do, money to do, or are comfortable doing!)

Now we need someone to recommend Drobo, Openfiler, Flexraid, WHS, and Synology! Wink

grantd · 2011-01-05, 00:15

I'm in a similar situation, just a step or two ahead. I was using WHS Vail and running it on dual core atom d510 setup and I was just getting more and more frustrated with it. I also didn't care for the drive extender technology (which apparently is going away). While it's fun to see a big pool of data it's less fun trying to get off of it. You essentially need enough extra drives to copy all of the data off (no chance of just plugging the drives into another machine). I found it to be a huge resource hog when it was doing much of anything.

I opted for ubuntu desktop 10.10 There might be a better solution (like server) but I'm pretty new to linux and wanted the GUI stuff. I like the Linux option as it's legitimately free, and they don't need to be rebooted all the time. They are also inherently more secure than a windows machine if you start having a little too much fun with downloading. It hasn't been a completely smooth road, but it's going pretty well.

I just run samba and Usenet rss Sabnzbd downloads on it.

In retrospect I could have probably gotten away with a prefab nas box, but I just thought they were awfully expensive compared to a comparable set up using computer parts and an old case/PSU

Piston Broke · 2011-01-05, 10:31

For a cheap file server I would recomend the Netgear ReadyNas as even the 2Tb version is only £269 and a Barebones system is £134

http://www.ebuyer.com/search?q=readynas+duo

The ReadyNas forum has lots of add ons for most things including torrent client (transmission), SABnzbd, wake on lan client and loads more and only draws 35W with 2x 500gb drives installed

My 500Gb model is about full and all I have to do is pull 1 drive install a bigger HDD wait for it sync then replace the other with the same size drive

maxinc · 2011-01-05, 11:25

+1 for unRAID ... very cheap, very expandable, well protected storage. And you can run all sorts of other things on it if you want to.

Geeba · 2011-01-05, 11:34

V1 Windows Home Server... dont use Vail betas!

It does the lot... pools old drives, has redundancy, can run other apps such as PS3Media server, FTP, Squeeze Centre, Ember Media manager, you can access it anywhere in the world as simply as browsing the web and it backs up all your PC to a state where you can rebuild them FULLY from a boot dist to an exact "as was" condition....

Nopel · 2011-01-05, 12:33

Solaris.

splnuts · 2011-01-05, 15:07

unraid has my vote. I switched to unraid in the last month and am not looking back.

**ashlar** · 2011-01-05, 18:13

Windows 7 + FlexRAID for me. With the new GUI in development it's a breeze to setup and manage. It doesn't provide real time protection, only scheduled (although FlexRAID Live is coming sooner or later and the developer has it already working), but it offers the opportunity to see everything as one big disk with FlexRAID View.