New Dune HD Max and HD Smart anticipation thread Q3 2010 - Page 196

Has anyone else had issues with the Dune Smart D1 running BD-Live from and ISO image?
I tried to run BD-Live on the John Mayer blu-ray and it just goes to a black screen and does nothing, this works fine on my PC using PowerDVD.
I tried to run BD-Live on the U2: 360 blu-ray and this seems to run fine except when I try to exit BD-Live there is a popup that asks if I want to exit with a yes/no prompt. The no prompt works however the yes prompt does nothing. This also works fine on my PC using PowerDVD.

I am not sure where you are looking but the dimensions are listed on the Dune HD website.

Are you saying the Zappiti only supports SMB connections?

I use WHS, the HP EX490. The drive extender allows mixes of drives, 1 TB, 2 TB, 5400 RPM, 7200 RPM, USB SATA. It is called pooling.
One can connect an external USB HDD and WHS presents a choice of pooling or stand alone. I use a WD Elements 2 TB as stand alone for WHS OS backup.

There are 3 2 TB drives in the EX490 and 4 2 TB drives in the esata connected Mediasonic enclosure for a total of 12 TB.

The WHS has NFS installed and the H1 is quite happy with that although SMB works fine as well. The Zapitti database is installed on a USB flash drive plugged in the H1 back but I have only used it with SMB, not NFS.
Note to self "must give that a try"

Streaming over my 1 Gbs cat6 network is flawless and I can stream to the H1 and the NG Neotv550 simultaneously without stutter.

Sadly, HP has discontinued their WHS devices as have the Asus and Acer equivalents.

Many choices still, take a look at the NAS charts on smallnetbuider.com:
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-charts/view
although UnRaid on a PC may be cheaper.

As dbone said, you're not exposed very much - only to the ISO's on the drive that dies. And since they're BD's, that's likely about 36-56 depending on size of drive based on max size of a BD ISO. As long as you're ok with re-ripping those if you lose a drive, then you should be fine if you're willing to accept the risk and re-rip when need be.

Not sure I understand your "to mature" comment re: WHS 2011. It's a very mature and stable product. The only major thing missing is drive pooling, which can be accomplished through 3rd party add-ins which are getting closer (but still not prime-time) to initial release. And yeah, I guess there aren't too many add-ins, but I haven't found that to be an issue (my 60tb WHS is running 2011 with Stablebit's DrivePool add-in installed).

Thanks Scott. I may ping you after I read through that. My buddy is still waiting (over a week later) for any response from Mike at Duneplayer re: repair or replace on his Smart D1 (lightning fried ethernet ports on lots of his equipment).

While I recommend option 1, there is also an option 3: use NFS instead of SMB. It doesn't have the one-share-per-server limit. I have more on my wiki.

You mentioned WHS and unRaid as viable options, but didn't mention the availability commercial NAS. I went through all of my DIY options and just decided that I'm willing to build my own computer, but not my own server. So I bought a ReadyNAS from Netgear. It was one of the best purchases I've made. Dune connects easily and maintenance is also easy. For example I just upgraded from 2 TB drives to 3 TB drives and it was really easy. I just replaced the drives one at a time and everything was rebuilt in the background while I was still able to stream to my Dune.

Anyway, I strongly recommend going with a good off the shelf NAS instead of DIY options. QNAP and ReadyNAS seem like good options.

MaximumPC talks about NASes in the following articles:
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/rev..._4_plus_review
and
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/fea...e_nas_showdown

I have also heard good things about Synology as well. I think the only thing that scares people off with some of the commercial solutions is price.

Good point. I guess since I don't have experience with NFS I didn't think about that one.

Since I am searching for the easy way to solve my own flaw when I set up the shares on my server, do you know if you can put the database in an NFS share and media in one of two SMB shares? It would only have to access the NFS and one of the SMB shares at the same time?

Also can the database be in both an NFS and SMB share at the same time so it is also visible to my Win7 machine?

Thanks.

I know this isn't the thread...but I wonder if any fellow Dune owners have found a good Tablet for playing videos while I'm traveling. I'm not talking anything fancy like ISO files or advanced audio support, but something that'll support a decent number of video formats. I thought about a iPad, but hate the whole iTunes tie-in.

I have an iPad and an Asus EeePad Tablet. I watch movies all the time on them (mostly my EeePad tablet when doing cardio or at home streamed from my WHS). With either tablet though you are going to want to encode unfortunately. There are Apps that will expand the number of supported files (I use M Player on my Android tablet), but things get dicey with 720p or greter content that is not in one of the native supported formats

Yeah the price is hard to swallow, but I found the benefits well worth the expense. One thing that surprised me was the size of the ReadyNAS - it is tiny enough to fit on top of my bookshelf. I'm saving to buying another NAS because there never is enough hard drive space.

Thanks for the feedback, it's actually just that, the drive pooling feature that I want to be sure works before I start thinking about a move. Also, I'd really like to hold off until drives get a bit larger, I'd like to build something in the 60 - 80 TB range but I'd like to accomplish that with at most 20 rather than 40 drives.

FlexRAID + WHS 2011 actually looks very interesting...

http://www.openegg.org/2011/10/18/fl...2011-spoilers/

I've been using FlexRAID with Windows 7 (Ultimate) and with the latest Release it has been rock solid. No reason to look anywhere else.

Real-time protection may be coming soon but I am not sure if its something I will enable since my data does not change all that often other than additions.

Thanks for those posts on FlexRAID. Prior to that link, I really didn't understand how FlexRAID worked. I had always assumed they (Flex, UnRAID, etc.) were more command line intensive and well over my head. That does indeed look very interesting. I need to research this more, as I may not want to continue to wait for a final release of DrivePool if this will do what I need.

Flexraid does sound good. Is there any way to implement flexraid into my existing setup (WHS v1 with no duplication enabled)? It sounds like a pretty ideal solution, my server's contents only change about once a week when I add a new release.

Yes, that should all work fine.

Thanks for sharing lot of information on NAS. I still need to understand raid/unraid/flexraid.

To start researching on, I would like to put this question. If I am willing to spend $800 to $1500 and need at least 8 bays or more (16 would be good) and not worried about any data protection, what would be good solution? This is just for movies and can always rip them again and there is no need to protect data.

Do these bays support 3tb hard drives? Is it possible to extend bays using USB external hard drives that contain movies(Not as backup)?

Unfortunately companies like Synology or qnap do not provide any contact info to talk to them to clarify any questions.

You can still use unRAID for that. You can use it without a parity drive. But I personally don't see the point in that. You really want at least some protection from data loss. My unRAID is setup with a Parity drive and a cache drive. Everything is copied over to the cache drive first, since that transfer rate is faster. then I have mine setup to transfer it to the shares 3 times a day. With the parity protection the transfer rates are slower which is why I use the cache drive.

Especially if you have some used parts and hard drives, the unRAID solution can be very inexpensive to setup.

Can't say enough good things about unRaid.

+1. If I can build it, anybody can. Great forum support too.

Ditto,

I was a flexRAID/Win 7 guy for a while. It worked but I was always nervous about the gap between a write and the parity update. All it takes is one Photo being added to a drive and the parity is invalid until the next update. also the lack of drive pooling for shares was a major difference. It is a cool product being able to run in a windows environment though. It they can get rt parity updates stable i would get excited about it again.

Now that i am on unRAID is don't see changing. It works, I can customize how my drives are used for different shares, parity is always valid, I can easily add drives at any time and include them in some or all existing shares, I can swap a small drive for a large one and not have to go through the copy process, 98% of it can be done through a GUI (unless you want to get into complicated add ons), works with up to 20 drives currently, you can run it on much lighter hardware than you would want for windows, it can display and monitor SMART info, drive statistics and usage. I could go on but I will stop.

The only downside for anyone considering this (at least that I know of):

1. This isn't a plug and play setup. You will more than likely have to read quite a bit on their wiki and support form before your setup and I highly advise you do. However there is strong user support on the forums across a large range of topics. If you are successfully using network media players, you can probably handle this one, just be ready for some research. If you aren't wanting to tackle it, there are people who sell preconfigured unRAID boxes to your specs. Once set up maintenance is pretty easy... iE adding or changing a drive.

2. The write speed is a little slow at 25 - 40 MB / sec. It's a function of RT parity protection on this type of setup, but the alternative is a hardware RAID 5 or 6 that is much more expensive and much less flexible. I will trade off write speed for flexibility and cost considering how small the impact of copying movie files to the server is. As a side note you can use a cache drive and speed up the write speed to abound 60 - 90 MB/ sec, but that data isn't protected till the scheduled copy to the array. Unlike flexraid the rest of the data is still under a valid parity.

Not trying to sound like a commercial, hopefully a helpful opinion.

That is a fallacy that has been beat to death. If you add/delete a file, the parity is not invalid. It will just not recover that particular file in case a recovery is needed.

The parity is still valid but only to the point where the update was made.

http://wiki.flexraid.com/2011/10/18/...snapshot-raid/

Thanks, that's a very clear explanation of what it does and doesn't protect so very helpful.

If you write a new file to the drive and it occupies a space that previously wan't occupied by a file at all I guess that does make sense as flex raid was probably ignoring those sectors completely. I believe flex raid works at the file system level.

However if it's an over-write, you delete a file and add a file, change a file, or replace one file with another I think there are still issues? The article you posted notes a "changed" file is an issue, but doesn't note the other over-write scenarios. I "think" the bottom line is protected sectors are overwritten it could be an issue.

I'm a user of unraid and have 11 drives right now. BUT I would of rather spent my money to get a Synology 1511+ since unraid doesn't support 3TB drives in a stable release and doesn't look like it will any time soon. I'm kind of "stuck" right now. I don't want to waste any money on more 2TB drives but unraid only supports 2TB drives. The Synology 1511+ is all about performance. Check out the read/write specs on that unit compared to anything else out there. I'm saving money right now to get the 1511+. Once the big expense is out of the way, I think I'll be happy.

I posted this in the mymovies thread previously, but I think it may be better suited here.
i have a Dune HD Smart B1 that I'm making progress on, but still have some hiccups with it. I'm running Zappiti successfully (thank you dbone) and have been able to preview every movie in my library (currently only imported my 20 BD). The issue I have, is when I reboot/power cycle my media server, which is a standard server running MS Server 2008 R2. I want to be able to power it down from time to time for energy savings, but every time I power it back up, when I try to access my shares I have an issue. When I go to the sources page on my dune, then access my NFS share folder, the folder is empty. if I go into the folder, hit popup menu and refresh, nothing happens. The only way I can get it to work is if I go to my sources page, select popup menu, edit folder, and then go to the bottom of the settings page and hit ok. After I do this, when I got into my share folder, it is fully populated with the sub folders.
This isn't necessarily an arduous task, but I'm hoping to eliminate it for the Mrs.

Just eliminate the Mrs, problem solved

Does the NFS server automatically start up when you reboot your server? I know with my WHS I had issues in the past where the NFS Server wouldn't start up on reboot, and I would have to manually restart. This doesn't necessarily sound like your problem, but i found NFS could be a little wonky from time to time.

Nice

Yes, the service starts up just fine. I don't have to alter anything on my media server when it starts back up, all the interaction is on the dune on the sources page. I'm using the Allegro NFS if that makes any difference, though I may opt to change over to the built in services on Server 2008...or just go to SMB.