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Network Attached Storage |
| igeekus posted 2009 Aug 31 10:17 |
| Hey Folks, I'm looking to build an expandable NAS and would love some suggestions.
Should I look at an inexpensive barebones system with gigabit ethernet and tons of usb ports? (i.e. acer aspire revo) Or should I go with something like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822108032 4 bay NAS, gigabit ethernet, 4 bays to start out with, 2xusb2.0, 1xesata (i'm kind of leaning towards this solution). But when I decide I want to expand, would an external chassis with usb2.0 interface work for streaming hd video over a gigabit network (I'll have everything hard wired)? I know esata is faster, but I'm curious where the bottleneck might be. FYI, I'd be looking at this to expand: usb 2.0: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816111047 esata: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816111048 The plan is for this to be a nas and nothing else. Software running would probably be freeNAS, or some linux varient and most likely software RAIDing. I don't mind spending a bit of money to get a decent system, but I also want to get the best bang for my buck. Suggestions? Thanks in advance! |
| redwudz posted 2009 Aug 31 13:58 |
| In theory, USB 2.0 could keep up, though not sure if it could with MKV or Blu-ray formats. What I did is just use a couple of full tower cases with cheap Micro-ATX MBs and CPUs and loaded them with HDDs. I use a gigabit LAN to access and turn on the servers remotely. The servers use whatever OS I had available, mostly XP, as the OS doesn't do much of anything with my setup anyway, just run the drives. I also used my router configuration to block those servers from internet access over the LAN to avoid problems. I have about 6TB of storage on the servers at present.
The playback may be fine with USB 2.0, but transferring the files initially to the USB drives may be slow. :( My drives are SATA and PATA and data transfers up to 85MB/s to the servers over the LAN. EDIT: I wouldn't bother with RAID unless you need data redundancy. Speed isn't much of a issue. Redundancy like RAID 1 or higher will take a lot of drives, though. :( |
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