NAS or Server - Page 8

Aside from NAS being very expensive, this is the main reason I'm leaning toward a server. My library is still pretty small but I have a lot of dvd's to rip yet, and from there everything will be much bigger (blu-ray) so I can see this getting up near 20 TB in the next few years. Here's my question: right now I have a quad core windows 7 box with a couple 2 TB data drives (os is on ssd) and will probably add a couple 3 TB drives over the next year. At that point I'd need to buy an expansion card to grow further, or I may decide to build a dedicated server. If I run flexraid now on my windows 7 installation, are there any gotchas when I want to move those drives to a dedicated server, possibly on whs? What about if I want to go to linux? What about a different software raid? Is it a bad idea, and I should just bite the bullet and build the dedicated server now?

One nice thing about NAS is its small size. Most are barely larger than the space it takes to house the drives. You'll be hard pressed to find a home-built server that comes close to the small foot print of a commercial NAS box. Also, some NAS boxes have expansion capabilties, and the expansion boxes are again barely larger than the space to house the drives.

Some higher end home office NAS boxes like those Intel processor based models made by Synology are full featured, with ready-to-install software for transcoding and streaming videos in realtime to IOS devices, VPN server for securely accessing your videos/pictures/etc from the Internet, plus chock full of other goodies. If you don't like to spend time tinkering with a home built server then NAS boxes are worth a look.

Says who ?

Don't forget an SSD.

From Mfusick's link:

Graphics Base Frequency: 650 MHz
Graphics Max Dynamic Frequency: 1.05 GHz

http://ark.intel.com/products/71072/Intel-Celeron-Processor-G1610-2M-Cache-2_60-GHz

Look under graphics specifications.

He could just boot into XBMC directly from a USB stick.

This is the newest Ivy Bridge chip. It's replacing the Sandy bridge CPU's like the G550/G530/G540 etc...

The GPU and performance relative to price is indeed a better solution than the other's IMO.

It can do 1080p or run any XBMC application without issue. I think you'd be very surprised how powerful that cheap lilttle CPU is. It can basically do anything... lol.

Aside from being a little weak for trancoding I don't think it has many drawbacks. I would not be surprised if it could trancode Plex even. It's really a nice little chip for under $40

Yup that would work fine. but you might like XMBC directly from USB stick better.

Just bought these two from Fry's yesterday without having to drive to Microcenter

http://www.frys.com/product/7381124 Price-matched to $50

http://www.frys.com/product/7545196 Price-matched to $40

Got a $20 MIR on the motherboard, so it was $70+ tax Adding it into a spare case with the extra 4GB stick of viper ddr3 1600 (from old slickdeal $12.50 - $25 for both already used the other)

Case was $40, they're going to be getting the Corsair builder cx430 that I've never been too fond of even though it was $25.

Best budget system ever - $147.50 w/o storage drives. Case is pretty low quality material, but you get what you pay for where budget cases are concerned

I believe the final day for the twenty dollar mail in rebate is today