HTPC & NAS in one box = trying to do too much?

my feeling is that is a horrible thing to do...
they are just too different...
NAS = low power processor, but lots of HDD's and fans... left on 24/7
HTPC = lots of power, killer graphics card, etc - but only on when needed...

I think overall you would have a much better experience and lower electric bill having two boxes that are optimized for what they are meant to do... than with one box that is at best a compromise...

Yep I 100% agree. Keep them separated, usually an HTPC is located with your home theater (obviously). To have it loaded up with a bunch of drives and fans working continuously to clear out the heat that's generated by them... no matter what it will be a bit loud and distracting. Not to mention if you have a multiseat household, it would need to be on all time time to serve media 24/7. I would much rather have a 24/7 NAS that is out of sight, out of mind.

I personally have an unRaid based server (it's actually an ESXi build with unRaid residing in one of the vm's) along with several Windows/MediaPortal based frontends around the house. It's a great setup and I highly recommend it. I see a lot of people trying to combine the 2 boxes, but in my mind they really need to be separated. Nobody wants to see a server in their family/living room lol. Not to mention the media server should be built to be a stable 24/7 machine. I don't know about you guys but I'm always tweaking my HTPC, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad. If it were down for some reason or another... every other room would need to suffer too.

This is doable. The issues are
a) how much money are you willing to put into this project, and
b) how much storage space exactly are are you planning on using?

I do something similar with my HTPC. I just leave it running 24/7. I have storage set aside for backing up our laptops and pictures/home movies. I have a program that kicks in around 2am and backs up our data and then CrashPlan kicks in and backs that up to an external HDD at my parents' house. I'm currently backing up about 800 GB of data and maintain three copies with two on-site and one off-site.

While it isn't a NAS box and doesn't run RAID, I use it as JBOD and it works just fine. It is also connected to everything with gigabit ethernet. I've got 28k+ pictures that I can browse from any computer as fast as if they resided on my local HDD.

Basically whenever I have a server type task I'll just cram it into my HTPC. I've never noticed any sort of performance hit and my HTPC was designed to be quiet from the beginning. Even if I was using it when my backups kick in the program is set to use minimal resources if I'm not away.

Mr. Kilroy,
I've been practicing what you want to do: that is reducing component count while many other here keep on buying gadget after gadget. A trend which is unsustainable.

So I use an Intel i5 655k dual processor overclocked to near 4GHz with a htpc with a 2TB Samsung boot drive, another 2TB split: one logical drive is for recordings and the second is for new Dvds. Finally a WD usb 3.0 3TB drive ($169 now!) for long term read only media. 8 GB of ram was $100. ATI/AMD 6000 series cards do everything, now even 2D-->conversion of 2D discs. I use WMC 7 for OTA HDTV and a Avertek dual tuner.

I use a 16 port Cisco gigabit switch and can stream easily up to 800mb/sec to other i3 htps or 300mbs wireless N notebooks.

Populating and making backups are simple with NTFS drives, but a pain with Linux drives. They could not use 3TB drive the last I tried.

Again many people here want to keep spending and discussing it forever and make their room look like a studio. Here is my Reducing Component Count Thread:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1261691

nothing beats a dedicated device.

even if both were atom based computers (which can be easily used for both your situations) atleast youll have the ability to work on one without bugging up the other.

I disagree - one unit can do it all, providing the benefit of less hardware to manage and less networking and connectivity issues to handle. Without requiring a big beast in your living room.

These days it is quite easy to find a basic dual core that can provide speed when needed but run cool most of the time. There is no need any longer to waste time with the Atom based solutions, which end up being a bottleneck.

Also I think the way to go is not to accumulate a lot of drives, but to use a single large HDD (1-3TB) as the storage unit, plus a large capaticity SSD as the boot/OS drive. If you do recordings, do them on that then shift them off to the storage drive later.

That gives you two drives max. You do need to back up, but that should be done on an external drive that is stored elsewhere.

I dont record and my storage needs are modest for the moment. In my case I have found that using a 1TB Mac Mini does it all and is pretty quiet. And that's not even an i-3 or 1-5 CPU, which can also be used in this situation without undue heat/noise.

I'm using one box for my HTPC and "NAS", but I needed to make compromises. The two main compromises are the video card and the amount of storage. I use integrated graphics (Clarkdale i5 661) and I'm limited to 4 hard drives (boot, 1TB TV Recordings, 2TB Media, and 2TB Media). This system is quiet (quieter than a PS3) and uses very little power.

The thing that will drive one to a dedicated NAS is storage space. My system with a standard tower case obviously can't be upgraded to a 40TB NAS. ~4TB of media storage will hold most of my media until the 3TB drives come down in price.

Tim

a HTPC and NAS setup has worked quite well for me, although I'm using the 2TB drive on the HTPC as a backup of my 2TB Raid0 drives on the PC, rather than a drive actively used to access files.

I set the HTPC to wake up at 6pm daily, backup sync automatically starts 6.05pm to the windows network share and then goes back to sleep at 3am. I chose those times as it was the likely times I'd be using the HTPC.

Also using ONE box for HTPC + NAS. I do have a seperate box for my gaming pc, however.
My spec for HTPC + NAS:
Case: Antec P183 with custom noise block foam padding
PSU: Seasonic X400 fanless
CPU: Core i5 2500K (overkill but was on sale at microcenter @ $179)
GPU: On cpu
HDD: A multitude of 750gb all the way to 2tb hdd with room for expansion both internally (with support for 3+tb hdd) and externally (with e-sata/usb3).


As it relates to noise/heat/power utilization:
Get green hdd that are 5400-5900rpm that run pretty cool (and make less noise). The new cpus are fairly power efficient.