Hi,
My main question is about types of file shares and streaming with XBMC
Does it matter if I use a NFS share or is SMB ok?
I am looking for some advice from anyone who has had experience setting up a media file server (a place to store my videos etc)
I currently have a stock standard PC, running software raid with two 3TB and two 2TB drives, Total of 5TB [/align]of RAID 1 storage.
I run XBMC as my main HTPC, this is installed on a 120GB SSD in the PC mentioned above so all my media is stored locally on the XBMC machine.
I am wanting to create a file/media server with redundancy storage.
I have heard that unRaid is really good but yesterday I read that it is not yet capable of 3TB and 4TB drives, seen I have 3TB drives I need a solution that will work with them.
I have also seen software called FlexRaid, and that runs on an OS such as Linux or windows... I have no idea about the performance or reliability of FlexRaid.
What about FreeNAS?
Could someone suggest any solutions for me?
I havent got a big budget. I will most likely use old hardware,
ie.
MB = P5Q SE/R
CPU = Intel® Core™2 Quad CPU Q9550 @ 2.83GHz
Any suggestions or tips would be great...
Should I be buying new hardware, i.e. new Motherboard and CPU?
You don't need anything other than something like ubuntu server, but if you want something turnkey then try
http://www.openmediavault.org/
SMB/NFS - well some say NFS is faster and more reliable, but when I tried to set it up for media file sharing about 10 years ago, I screwed something up and couldn't get it going and I have used samba ever since. Use what you are comfortable with. XBMC handles both.
OK thanks,
What is the best way to have your media protected though? I want to kn0ow if a hard drive fails I can recover etc...
Backup offsite. Amazon s3 is cheap as chips.
OTOH it's just movies...
Amazon s3 is not great for New Zealanders wanting to push that much traffic over small bandwidth allowances...
Flexraid is a solid solution for protection. Its easy to add/replace/restore drives. Been using it for 3years now in combination with Drivepool on WHS2011. 3 weeks ago i lost my OS drive which also contained a portion of my data on its second partions. So i got me a new SSD to replace OS drive and a 2TB to replace the Data partition. Reinstalled Flexraid, pointed it to my parity drive (which has raid configuration saved) launched the restore and was able to recover the missing data without a hich.
Yeah true, I use S3 for the office though as I have lived through an earthquake where the traditional "portable hard drive" method[1] failed. S3 is OK for that as it is (IMHO) a necessary business expense, and work and pdf and acounting information is not overly large.
RAID is NOT backup, but it can have some redundancy, as long as you notice when the redundant drive fails and are prepared to spend significant time rebuilding arrays. It is never a backup as in "oh shit I/my wife/my kid just deleted my 1080p rip of Firefly".
Snapshotting is also not backup, as it is usually stored on the same hard drive or array.
For movies/music/TV I figure the data is a pain to lose it but not irreplaceable.
[1] ie where you have two backup drives. Each night someone takes one home and leaves the other to take a backup. The strategy fails because both drives are in the office when disaster strikes. Offsite but local also failed because the backups, although over quick and cheap fibre, were often to servers also in the CBD, which were also lost/unavailable.
PS Hey KIWI!!
Hey nickr.
Yes, absolutely correct. Just trying to save myself a heap of time and effort if a hard drive does fail
Keep it simple.
Build a big ass Win7 box that has LOTS of SATA ports (mine had 8, and a couple of PATA IDE as well) and tons of drive bay space
Buy the biggest drives you can (right now I have 2 & 3 TB's drives installed... tempted to get the 4 TB as upgrades)
Then run each drive as a shared SMB, with all your data.
(You don't need the fastest processor or MB... you are not building a gaming system... you are building a video server. The previous gen processor (like the Intel Q6600) will do you fine. Asus boards are usually rock solid.
THEN... buy a couple of eSATA external arrays (shop, they can be had cheap - Rosewell is a good source) and build your backup.
20 TB in the main server, 2 @ 10 TB backup boxes. 40 TB total.
To manage the backup of the data, I use SyncBack Free. Fast, simple efficient. (so my back up arrays rarely are run.)
You don't need to jump into it all at once. Add some drives, have only one external array box... build it for what you need. However it is easily expandable and upgradeable.
I can have any device fail and still have a solid recovery. (so far lost one drive, RMA'ed, a video card and a power supply... and still ticking.)
In case of emergency, I can grab my two back-up boxes and split. (I live in a fire prone area. It is a concern, so it is my main back-up location as well.)
Why did I choose this for me?
I have had an unrecoverable RAID 5 failure way back in the past. NEVER trust any single technology.
EVER.
See I'd rather have the whole 40TB as movie storage and risk it...
If you want backups, buy a tapedrive and some older tapes and make a backup. Then store the backup offsite.
I have a low-powered 1155-based processor, on a board with plenty of SATA ports, and a number of large hard drives.
I'm running Windows Home Server 2011, with
StableBit DriveBender to present all my drives as a single "storage pool" drive.
I have some of my "critical" stuff that I can't replace (documents, photos), and this is duplicated across multiple disks, so I would be safe from a disk failure. This is also then backed up to an online storage service - or this could be backed up to an external drive and stored off-site somewhere.
My other media - music, videos, game installers/patches etc, is all replaceable - so I don't bother wasting hard drive space duplicating stuff I can acquire again. OK, it may take me a while to source and re-acquire this stuff, but it's stuff that's available *somewhere*, it's not like my family photos!
With DriveBender, you can add/change disks very easily, and you can specify just individual folders to duplicate, making the most efficient use of my hard drive space.