[jnalli121]

well, i just moved into a new home, with a nice basement which would make the perfect space for a home theater. Ive been using xbmc on my laptop for a year now and its great when i hook it up to my 40" 1080P HDTV. Problem is, that my laptop doesn't have enough space for all my HD movies, tv-shows etc. So i was planning on building(freeNAS) or buying(something like drobo with drobo share) a home server and then purchasing a small pc that can sit underneath my TV and play streaming HD videos (and make use of all the great XBMC plugins) without ANY lag if possible. I was thinking:

The NAS box

• Old PC off of craigslist with 4 Hard Drive bays (any suggestions for an always on CPU with low power consumption and capability to stream HD?)
  
• 4 1.5TB hard drives(which i think is the highest you can get at this time?)
  

This would sit inside a closet, always on,streaming media across the house to various devices(phone, ipod, laptops, computers, and HTPC of course) and torrenting files when not streaming
Also any suggestions on what kind of cooling i would need for this thing?

The HTPC
this is where i have no clue, ive looked at some of the nettops which claim full HD 1080P but have heard that they tend to lag a lot when anything is done over the home network.
Ive looked at the asrock 330(i think) but havent given it any thought.
Everything else that claims to be an HTPC looks like a standard tower PC which would look strange next to all my A/V equipment.
I also want something that has surround sound capabilities so that i can plug it into my A/V reciever
I can also assemble a PC myself so any suggestions for parts would be nice, but id want the HTPC to "blend in" with my tv equipment if possible.

The Setup
I was thinking id soundproof a small portion of the basement, wall mount the TV with a TV stand below consisting of the A/V reciever, Blu-Ray player, DVD player, and the HTPC. And to control all of this i was thinking logitech harmony remote. And to finish it off throw in the clapper(http://www.amazon.com/Clapper-Sound-Acti...B0000CGKLR)

Side Question: would the speed of my internet matter, since its going to be running on a LAN network? If so, is 12-15mbps enoughto stream 1080p video, or would i need to upgrade?

Note: im not great when it comes to computers by any means, and anything here can be changed according to your advice, so please help!

[kortina]

Step 1) Build a FreeNAS box. Any P4 2.6ghz or above will be fine, put 512meg ram in it or a bit more if you have it. This will be MUCH faster than almost every NAS on the market, and about half the cost. Make sure the motherboard has at least 4 sata ports, and boot from USB.

Put your 4 x 1.5tb drives in it, install FreeNAS to a USB stick and off you go.


Step 2) Get an AsRock ION 330, install XBMCLive

Step 3) Connect the ION and the FreeNAS to your router

Step 4) Get rid of your DVD player, rip your DVD's to ISO files and put them on your NAS

Step 5) Get an MCE Remote, the cost of the remote is half of a multi function, and the setup is supported out of the box, so you wont waste hours of time trying to get a weird remote to work

Step 6) Get rid of your BluRay player, rip your BD disks to MVK files, put them on your NAS

Step 7) enjoy your simple setup

[jnalli121]

thanks for the fast reply! been refreshing the page for a while lol.
anyway, id rather not get rid of the Blu-Ray player since ripping Blu-Rays takes forever and its always nice to have the option of popping in a disc, when friends come over or something. Im mostly just going to rip all the tv-shows i have onto the NAS. Also can the asrock do surround sound? if so 5.1 or 7.1?

[BORIStheBLADE]

If you want a always on server that has low power consumption I would stay away from a old craigslist pc.

I had an old p4 single core 2.4ghz pc as a server and it sucked almost 80 watts idling.

I would buy something newer that would draw less power. I just bought one of these last week and put windows 7 on it. It draws about 40 watts idling. Its also got a 1gigabite NIC.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6813121359

I'm not saying to buy this one, but I wanted to show you the difference.

[snoxbox]

The NAS box
This would sit inside a closet, always on,streaming media across the house to various devices(phone, ipod, laptops, computers, and HTPC of course) and torrenting files when not streaming
Also any suggestions on what kind of cooling i would need for this thing?

[

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a FreeNAS box limited to NAS capabilites (i.e. no torrents)?

I looked at setting up a Raid server using unRaid, but ended up going with flex-raid. The reason I did this is flex-raid sits on top of whatever OS you want to run, so you can have a windows box, sharing your hard drives, downloading torrents, converting media, ripping blu-rays etc.

Advantages that flexraid (and unRaid) have over other raid setups:

1. You can have as many drives as you want.
2. Your drives can all be of varying sizes and types
3. You only need 1 parity drive (which is equal to or bigger then your largest data drive)
4. You can add drives easily.
5. [Flex-Raid only] Your parity drive can be an external drive. You can power it on once a day/week, and re-sync your raid.

So I have 4 x 1.5tb, 4 x 500gb in my PC, and a 1.5tb external. As soon as 2 tb's become cheaper, I'll swap out the 500's one at a time, and can utilise the full 2tb without having to have all my drives 2tb.

[kortina]

I agree with the power issues, some of the older style P4's are bad.

The best I have found is a Celeron 440 @ 2ghz , which is only 35w (max)

Where most Core2 and Quads are 65w/90w/120w

I am not certain with the AsRock, but my Zotac9300 itx setup has a SPDIF (optical) out, and does 5.1 with no issues at all.

FreeNAS can do JBOD raid, where all the discs can be different sizes. Just like flexraid has been described.

I am not sure about how to run a torrent app on BSD. I personally use a Win2008R2 server (Because I want DHCP, DNS, HyperV and uTorrent) but I am lucky to have a Microsoft subscription.

[mojo6911]

I would just go with an ATOM ION system. Running a Ubuntu server edition with no window manager, it will run fine as a server. Get an efficient power supply, and it could run as low as 40w at the plug, depending on the amount of hard drives you supply. Depending on how you want to share it, you could install Samba to allow Windows computers to view the shares, or tons of other software.

You can run torrent apps, newsgroup apps, etc, all with low memory and power usage.

[tehsoul]

if you have the budget, a Netgear ReadyNAS NV/NV+ (4 bay nas) can be found at pretty decent prices nowadays. picked up an extra one a few weeks ago for 250eur. can't beat that, considering the easiness

[jnalli121]

thanks for all the replies guys.

i found a Hp home server on Newegg which has a 2.2ghz celeron processor and comes with windows home server installed.

i think i will buy 1 of those, and leave it running all the time, and buy an asrock ion to sit beneath the TV (just found that it has s/p dif as well so 5.1 is a go!)

now the only question i still have is does the internet connection speed matter when streaming HD video?

[kizer]

Internet connection only matters if your streaming vidoe/audio out of the house. If its across your home network then technically it never leaves your house. I would avoid wireless if all possible and keep everything thats streaming to a wired connection.

I use wireless at home for my Laptops, but if they skip I know its my fault not my videos fault.

Heres a lot of chatter about the AsRock Ion
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=59432

Its on my shopping list.
I personally have a pair of these with two drives in each that I manually backup to keep the raid nonsense out of things. They turn on when they are accessed otherwise they just sleep.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...-_-Product

Old Firmware used to suck, but its much more reliable now.