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I have an HTPC running XBMC in the living room, and currently I have to manually move HD content over via a USB drive. What I'd like to do is stream 1080p over the network, whether the solution is wireless N, powerline or cat5.
Instead of building and maintaining a full NAS, I would really rather just have a bunch of external drives on the network, and be able to easily add more as-needed. I don't care about RAID or anything, because if anything is important I'll back it up somewhere in the cloud.
I really like the WD Elements drive that I have because it spins down when not in use. If I could add those ad-hoc to the network that would be perfect.
It looks like there are a bunch of products out there (Pogoplug, CiragoLink+, etc), but I'm not sure if anything is really suitable or capable of streaming 1080p. Is there anything available that might be able to handle something like this?
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You can avoid building and maintaining a nas if you just buy one :-). I'm not sure what your storage needs are, but you could consider just buying something like a 4 bay Readynas or synology nas. You literally buy it, put in the disks, plug it in, create a file share, and never worry about it again.
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That seems like an expensive path if I want more space, because then I have to buy a new unit, new drives, etc. I would rather hot-swap drives simply by unplugging a USB cable... and if I wanted 10 externals plugged in and available that wouldn't be a problem.
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noggin
Posting Freak
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2013-02-21, 12:21
(This post was last modified: 2013-02-21, 12:21 by noggin.)
Out of the box the Pogoplugs don't (or certainly didn't) use standard file-sharing protocols and instead used their own bespoke standard (that required software to be installed on every client). However the Pink Pogoplug was relatively easy to hack to run Debian or similar.
When you say "1080p" what do you mean though? 1080p can mean anything from 5Mbs to 50Mbs it appears. 5Mbs is pretty easy to stream over WiFi, 50Mbs can defeat a lot of Powerline networks...
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You really should consider unRaid. You don't have to learn anything about what typical RAID is,....all you need to know is that unRaid works.
The great thing about it is,....you add drives as you need more space.
Buying one of those synology or similar devices is so expensive in my opinion,..and then you're limited to how many drives it can contain.
Rather than blab about it in this thread,...search on it,...and you'll find all you need to know.
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Why don't you build your own nas?
Buy a full size tower with good ventilation and tons of HDD slots and good board with loads of esata/usb 3 ports and a good linux distro and you're good to go.
The big advantage is that you can swap disks as you want, replace them, add more, whatever and all you have to do is just add a line in a file.
That sounds pretty easy to me.
If you add/remove more than one drive a year then you have an issue of maybe over-storing (3-4 4Tb bytes drives are more enough for thousands of hours of high quality movies).
Concerning the network itself, my wifi n manages streaming of 1080p files up to 25Mbs but if any interference, XBMC will have to rebuffer again and i have to have to separate wifi networks on my router to be able to stream and download from another computer at the same time. By chance, I have a lot of channels available in my building.
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i am looking into changing my server setup i currently have the standard hard drives in a server case but i am thinking of changing because i have run out of sata ports on motherboard and raid cards so thinking of buying hdd enclosures with usb 3 i can power four hdds off one usb 3 cable that way and usb 3 adapter cards are like $20 so cheap to get if run out they also have external power sources so can then build a small pc to run my windows server OS and just run off a cheap ssd or laptop drive i have tested streaming a 15gb 1080p movie over my network from a 2,5inch drive connected to usb 2.0 and it works great so it can only be better with usb 3.0 see as it is a lot faster
this way i can add almost as many of these enclosures as i need over time i have seen boards with up to 6 usb 3 ports on them plus the additional of adapter cards i can get at least 10 usb port and if each had a 4 bay or even 8 bay enclosure that is some serious storage
10 x 4 bays x 4x3tb drives = a possible capacity of 120TB !!!! and that's just using the 4 bay enclosures they come in 8 bay as well
