Computermabob help - NAS drives and RAID? NLC

[DDtB]

I've got 2 spare Readynas Duos with drives ... if anyone wants to make me an offer i can't refuse!

[robin]

Assuming you're going to use it for home entertainment (donkey porn) plus the usual range of file storage, etc., then I would suggest

http://www.freenas.org/

Did you buy any additional drives for it? It only comes with one paltry 250GByte drive which won't be big enough and obviously you cannot do RAID protection of your data with just one drive.

Cheers,
Robin

[robin]

P.S. Despite the RAID1 backup you might still want to use something like dropbox to create a small share that is backed up to the internet. You can get approx 5GByte for free (with a bit of jiggery pokery) which should be enough to keep stuff that you really would like to keep forever. Pretty sure you can get dropbox running on top of the freenas - worst case you run it on your laptop - same difference really.

Cheers,
Robin

[pete]

At the moment I have a desktop running XP, backed up to a USB drive and dropbox. Even I realise this is pants, especially as XP just crashed and one of the hard drives is soudning unwell.

So I'll be getting 2 HDDs for the Proliant thingy which also means I can start turning my desktop off more, as hopefully I'll connect it to the printer as well.

freenas. That sounds like a better plan than my "Windows Home Server" plan. i particualarly like the name, "free".

[robin]

If you haven't got the disks yet, hold fire - I might have 3x250GB drives going to the skip which will fit right in next to the single 250GB supplied with the machine. Will find out tomorrow.

Cheers,
Robin

[campbell]

Fascinating, actually. The miniDLNA and Firefly plugins are potential game winners for us. But I would need an iTunes installation too for managing our apps, movies and music. And Picasa for photos.

Pete - I have a v similar setup to yours which has been serving us well. IMHO XP is pretty stable now. You prob just need to refresh your disks. This is what I did and our setup is now heading for 10 yrs service ...

[Ferg]

I bought a £20 raid card and mirrored two additional drives. If you keep the OS on a seperate drive, in case of failure those drives can be used easily in a caddy to retreive the data. A free DLNA solution and NTFS shares are all I've ever needed. I have this running in a seperate towere but the principle is the same.

[pete]

Fascinating, actually. The miniDLNA and Firefly plugins are potential game winners for us. But I would need an iTunes installation too for managing our apps, movies and music. And Picasa for photos.

Pete - I have a v similar setup to yours which has been serving us well. IMHO XP is pretty stable now. You prob just need to refresh your disks. This is what I did and our setup is now heading for 10 yrs service ...

My setup is knocking on for 10 years. I really like the idea of a box in a cupboard though.

Robin that's really kind but the current disc (1tb) is full so I'm think 2x 2tb will sort me out for another 5 yrs or so. Although one 250 would be ace to mirror the other one in the server OS disc. )that gives proper redundancy right? Albeit massively over sized!)

Campbell,
Xp has served us really well but I think it just needs a fix. Now Millie uses it more and more I'll move towards that being hers (once I've fixed XP).

[robin]

Hi Pete,

You need to be a bit careful with mirroring the boot drive - it can be done, but requires a bit of care to make sure the system will boot regardless of which drive is fitted. I am sure you'll find someone running the FreeNAS setup with mirrored boot drive.

Campbell, you would need to look at running something apply to do what you want - I imagine there is a genuine iTunes server of some sort, but I've no idea what it looks like and it's bound not to be supportable by 3rd parties given their normal approach to this stuff. A quick google confirms the usual Apple BS applies:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/49 ... 0&tstart=0

http://blog.synology.com/blog/?p=29

Cheers,
Robin

[pete]

My plan Campbell is that the XP box, or even one of the laptops, will run itunes with the network drives as the library. TBH the thing that has stopped me until now was I listen to a lot of podcasts through my iphone and it was such a faff to update them every week. Now the new podcast app deals with that so I only need to plug it in when I am changing the songs on it.

Suzy left the apple fold to get a Samsung so she can update her tunes easily... I use XBMC as a media server and that doesn't care where the music is.

[campbell]

didn't Kelvin have a Synology Disk station? looks promising...


TBH, the fact that I sparked up my new Toshiba Android tablet and it immediately found our Mezzmo media server makes me happy enough with our current lashup. But always good to have an eye to the future...

[Corranga]

The server mentioned earlier in this thread is back below 100UKP (OK only just) having leapt up to more than twice that whilst I procrastinated last year...

I bought one a few months back, and still haven't got it all plugged up and running (mainly due to wanting wires run around the house and not liking small spaces much - like under the house, well, and taking on stupid tasks like Elise steering racks..) Let me know how you get on, hopefully my Windows 8 running proliant will be up and running this month anyway, though I'm still running it with a strange assortment of HDDs not in RAID, I really need to pull everything together then figure out what sort of drives I need rather than the 250/500/1tb I currently have

[robin]

Drives are so cheap it is madness to do any work and not sort out the drive configuration at the same time! Avoid 3TByte drives though as there is a problem in the BIOS and with the AMD RAID driver with >2TByte drives.

Cheers,
Robin

[r10crw]

Dont know if its of any interest but there is a Nas thingy on Seloc Classifieds,
http://classifieds.seloc.org/ads/netgea ... as-server/

[pete]

This evening I will be setting up my new box with FreeNAS.

(Several hours later)

Quite a steep learning curve. Errrm I may have acronym overload (ao).