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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.
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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?
Code:
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `xbmc_%`.* TO 'xbmc'@'%';
IF you have a mysql problem, find one of the 4 dozen threads already open.
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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.
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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.
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grantd
Junior Member
Posts: 39
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
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maxinc
Senior Member
Posts: 299
+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.
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Geeba
Posting Freak
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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....
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unraid has my vote. I switched to unraid in the last month and am not looking back.
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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.
For troubleshooting and bug reporting please make sure you
read this first (usually it's enough to follow instructions in the second post).