[Lewshus]

Just as the title says. I am in the planning process of building a htpc and a server. Lately I have been reading a lot about NAS.

So i was curious if its more cost effective and future proof to build a media server or buy NAS.


I will be using the server for storing movies, music, pictures and other misc files.


If a NAS is the best answer can you guys please direct me which ones are best.


If a server is the best answer, I could use some help parts-wise there also.



Thank you for reading.

 

[ash_man]

To me, they are different devices that serve different purposes, a HTPC is meant to sever up media with the ability to store some locally, but is not a storage device in itself like a NAS. A NAS is a Network Attached Storage device whose main purpose is the storage of data available on a network. Some people like to combine the two which you can certainly do, I would rather separate them, but thats a personal preference.


If you want to look at name brand NAS's I would suggest Synology or Qnap I own NAS's from both companies and they are very well built, reliable and worth their price. I would suggest you start off with a at least a four bay model so you can grow into it even if you only start off with two drives.


If you want to look into building your own NAS, then there are plenty of things to look at, cases, motherboards and OS such as FreeNas, Snapraid or Flexraid or you can look at purchasing a hardware raid controller and do it that way.


Good luck!

 

[mediamatters]


I have a Synology and NAS, and its pretty great. The OS includes plugins for a few media servers as well (serviio, plex, and a few of their homebrew apps), so you're kind of killing 2 birds with one stone. But you'll still need a client to hook up to your TV (PS3, Roku, Raspberry Pi, etc) or maybe your TV has something built-in? 

 

I would say that if building something is a fun activity for you, then great, but these days it is mostly just as cost effective to buy something pre-built for you...

 

[funhouse69]


I am a computer guy, I love building, maintaining and upgrading computers as well as servers. With that in mind I've done exactly what you mentioned and built a few servers with RAID Systems that hold all of my movies, photos, music and documents (About 15TB Worth). I've also built HTPCs that I have connected to my TV's and use them to play my DVD Collection.

 

Keep in mind that there is no such thing as "Future Proof" when it comes to anything technology related. There is always going to be something coming out (usually the week or month) after you decide to buy something so you can forget about that right off the bat. Even the fastest system today (which would be very expensive) will be "Slow" in 3-5 years but might still work for your needs but will eventually need to be updated or completely replaced depending on what your needs are at the time.

 

So the solution is completely subjective and depends on you, your needs, your budget, your technical ability, your desire / ability to "Tweak" things on a regular basis. Personally after lots and lots of trial and error I've had tremendous luck with the hardware that I have chose which is as follows:

ASUS / GigaByte Motherboards

Super Micro Hard Drive Enclosures fitted in a Tower Case

3Ware (Now LSI) Caching RAID Controllers

Seagate Hard Drives.

 

Because I was happy / content with my existing set up I never ventured in to Blu-Ray until this past Christmas. Now I am completely hooked and ran in to issues with my current HTPC Systems being several years old not being able to play Blu-Ray Rips properly. At the same time Blu-Ray Rips take up a significant amount of space (usually 2 to 4 or more times that of DVD). So I need to either expand or add more storage to my network.

 

That said I was at the point where I started looking to go in a different direction and tried FreeNAS which seems to be really reliable but is limited to the number of SATA Ports you can get on a single motherboard. If you add in a RAID Controller you are kind of defeating the purpose of going with FreeNAS other than the cost of the operating system.

 

I've tried a few different NAS Devices over the years and never really cared for them, they were always way slower than anything that I built and were really costly. Since joining this site I've heard nothing but great things about Synology and decided to give one of their NAS's a try so I picked up the DS1813+ when Amazon had a special recently and I have to say I am thoroughly impressed with it and would highly recommend it to anyone that is looking for a NAS Solution. Sure they are "Expensive" but are they when you compare what it would cost to build a system with hotswap bays and the performance that they have? Again all relative.

 

So what I've done just to make my life a little simpler is go with a Synology NAS and a Mede8er Player which has been the best MediaPlayer I've tried for the money and believe me I've tried many of them over the last few months. All of which except for the Mede8er have gone back.

 

I hope this will give you something to think about and consider your options. If you have any question let me know I'd be happy to help as much as I can.

 

[Lewshus]



Quote:
Originally Posted by funhouse69  /t/1517545/is-it-better-to-build-a-media-server-or-buy-a-nas#post_24351123


I hope this will give you something to think about and consider your options. If you have any question let me know I'd be happy to help as much as I can.

Thank you all for the reponses. I appreciate your time and expertise.


Maybe im getting my terms mixed up. I thought a NAS and a media server kind of served the same purpose of storing media. And then you would use an htpc to play the media on your tv.


With the synology does it take the place of both the htpc and server? And do you just hook it straight up to your tv?

 

[dmarqueset]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Lewshus  /t/1517545/is-it-better-to-build-a-media-server-or-buy-a-nas#post_24352646


Thank you all for the reponses. I appreciate your time and expertise.


Maybe im getting my terms mixed up. I thought a NAS and a media server kind of served the same purpose of storing media. And then you would use an htpc to play the media on your tv.


With the synology does it take the place of both the htpc and server? And do you just hook it straight up to your tv?

The Synology is for the most part just storage. It sits on your network. As mediamatters stated above, it has a few apps but you will still need something to read the device. I would add an Intel NUC as another device that could be used to read from the Synology or any other NAS.

http://www.synology.com/en-us/

 

[mediamatters]


NAS just refers to storage, basically. In the instance of the Synology, it has an OS that can do many other things besides just share files (media server, mail server, backup, etc).

 

In this instance, the "media server" would just be software that serves up media to another device (like a Roku) that is connected to your TV. The synology does not connect to your TV.

 

If you want something that does it all in one, for example, you could build a full computer with plenty of hard drive space that attaches to your TV. In that scenario, you would not "need" any media server software, you could just play files using whatever player (VLC, Windows Media Player, etc) you want. But some media-centric software would make the interface look nice, easy to use a remote control, etc.

 

Something inbetween would be like a WD TV Live box. It is a media server that connects to your TV but doesn't have any real storage capacity. It would pull the content off any network share.

 

[Lewshus]

Hmmmm, looks like I have a lot of thinking to do. Im guessing the most expensive part of the build would the hard drives. Especially considering I need between 15-20 tb's

 

[dhodory]

I find myself in a similar situation -- but I've already purchased a NAS (QNAP TS-639 Pro -- I do not recommend QNAP, btw, my model has had significant durability/reliability issues and even though this has been a widely known issue among QNAP owners, QNAP did not stand behind their product -- but I digress), but the CPU in the QNAP is not capable of transcoding content using Plex Media server. This isn't anyone's fault other than mine, I bought the QNAP prior to really having thought this all the way through.


In my opinion, your decision rests almost entirely upon *how* you intend to stream your media.


If you plan on using an app like Plex Media server to store and transcode your media on the fly, then a "build it yourself" home media server with thin clients at each TV is probably going to be the most cost effective approach. The NAS devices out there that have a CPU big enough to transcode on the fly are almost all in the $1,500+ range (before adding hard drives), while you can build a sufficiently powerful server for less than that. Granted, it won't be as pretty, as small, or as easy, but it will be more capable, more expandable/configurable, more upgrade-able, and cheaper.


If, however, you're going to rip and encode all of your media to a single format (or multiple formats for multiple devices) and won't be doing anything other that "serving up content" to thin clients at each TV then a NAS is do-able. It still won't be cheaper than building your own server, but a NAS will work, and you'll get all of the benefits associated with someone else's R&D, and save a significant amount of time/effort.


How you value your time, and how proficient your are at tinkering with PCs, servers, and NAS software will have a lot to do with what choice you make. If you have time and are wiling to learn, building your own servers and thin clients can be fun. If you want to just install the hard drives, power up, configure your router and "go" . . . a NAS is a quick solution (provided you don't need to transcode on the fly or can afford a NAS with a sufficiently powerful CPU).


The answer to the above questions - what formats of media you have, whether your want to be able to transcode, and time versus budget, etc. -- will drive the big bucket decision of server vs. NAS (from a cost-effectiveness stand point). From there it will be details around what type of server or thin clients you want to build/use or which brand of NAS you want to buy.

 

[ash_man]

That's unfortunate that you have had a bad experience with your QNap, I have the model just before yours the TS-639 and I have had zero problems with it over the three or more years I've had it.

 

[funhouse69]


You mentioned hard drives and cost...It is worth mentioning that not all hard drives are created equal. There are different classes of hard drives. While you might be able to build a RAID with "Desktop" Drives and have no issues whatsoever most manufacturers these days also make drives that are made for NAS or Enterprise environments which means they are made to be on 24x7x365. There is some talk that desktop drives do not have some of the features that make a drive better for NAS use but I haven't seen any specific instances.

 

Now if you have decided on a RAID or NAS you need to decide on what level of protection you want to go. The most common configurations are RAID 5 (One Parity Drive) and RAID 6 (Two Parity Drives), different companies might call them different things / have variations of it but the bottom line is the number of drives that you can have fail before you loose your data. RAID 5 is one and RAID 6 is two meaning in a RAID 5 if one drive fails you are ok a second and you are screwed. RAID 6, two drives and you are ok, a third and well... you get the point. Obviously there is a cost associated with each one as you loose the storage capacity of the Parity Drives not to mention the slot you put it in doesn't give you any more storage.

 

So to put this in to perspective to get the 15 - 20TB you are looking at you will be looking at using 4TB Drives which is the largest currently available main stream (although the 6TB Drives are shipping from one company but insane money). Due to the way a drive is made and formatted you aren't getting a full 4TB of storage you are actually getting 3.64TB of Storage for each 4TB Drive so:

 

15TB of useable space would be 4.12 Drives of actual storage (not including any parity) so rounding up would mean 6 Drives for RAID 5 and 7 Drives for RAID 6

20TB of useable space would be 5.49 Drives of actual storage (not including any parity) again rounding up would mean 7 Drives for RAID 5 and 8 Drives for RAID 6

 

Figure $179 for each drives (NAS Class) and that adds up very quickly and if you go with something like the Synology DS1813+ you've filled up the base unit to get 20TB. A nice feature of some of the Synology units is that they can be expanded by adding an expansion unit. These aren't cheap but will ultimately let you take a base unit like their 8 bay and add an additional 10 bays (using Two DX512 units).

 

Most people feel that once we went in to the 3TB and larger drives RAID 6 or two parity drives is the way to go mostly because of the amount of time it can take to rebuild a RAID. There are many factors that affect how quickly a RAID can rebuild but with large drives we are talking DAYS not hours. So if you happen to experience another drive failure during the rebuild which is entirely possible that extra drive can be worth the extra piece of mind.

 

[BruceD]

With today's technology rapidly adopting virtualization, I built an all in one single box htpc/server that resides in an closed equipment room.

• VMware 5.1 ESXi as the hardware operating system
• virtual win7 with WMC (also running ServerWMC for Open ELEC clients)
• virtual WHS2011
• virtual MS server 2008R2
• virtual pfsense firewall

It is a consumer based Asrock H77 Pro4M motherboard

• 16GB RAM
• Intel i5-3550 CPU (includes GPU) Ivy Bridge
• IBM 1015M PCIe disk controller card (8 SATA drives non-RAID mode)
• 4 x 3TB drives data storage to start (use Flexraid for parity-checking like RAID)
• 120GB and 64GB SDD drives for virtual WHS and win7 OS
• 4GB Flash drive on motherboard is ESXi boot
• Network Cablecard tuner (3 tuners) for Comcast cable -- HD Homerun Prime
• 24 port Gigabit Managed network switch connects everything on wired connections

I use OpenELEC on a 4GB Flash drive, no hard drives or video cards (on an Intel NUC celeron and a couple older mATX pcs) at my TV locations to play all the content located on the htpc/server and liveTV through WMC and the HD Homerun Prime (can also record shows).


I'm in the IT business, so I deal with VMware on a daily basis, but my cost on the htpc/server single box solution comes in around a $1000.

 

[Dan0myte]


A group of engineers from Synology left and started their own company, Asustor, with forward thinking designs and new technologies for NAS devices. 

 

If you're going to go the NAS route, definitely check them out. I picked up 302 and it's been fantastic, with the direct HDMI output to my reciever via XMBC being a huge plus.

 

http://www.asustor.com/

 

[dhodory]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Dan0myte  /t/1517545/is-it-better-to-build-a-media-server-or-buy-a-nas#post_24357870


A group of engineers from Synology left and started their own company, Asustor, with forward thinking designs and new technologies for NAS devices. 


If you're going to go the NAS route, definitely check them out. I picked up 302 and it's been fantastic, with the direct HDMI output to my reciever via XMBC being a huge plus.

http://www.asustor.com/

Those look interesting, but based on processor specs (all run Intel Atom processors) I'm not sure I'd trust to trans-code video on the fly in Plex, and definitely not for more than one stream.


Actually, here's a comprehensive list of which NAS units you can run Plex on and which ones can trans-code 720 and 1080p on the fly:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhqU12yGv_OxdC1VYjYtMmRiSlVReVZhNVBLZ0JxSmc#gid=0

 

[dhodory]



Quote:
Originally Posted by ash_man  /t/1517545/is-it-better-to-build-a-media-server-or-buy-a-nas#post_24354619


That's unfortunate that you have had a bad experience with your QNap, I have the model just before yours the TS-639 and I have had zero problems with it over the three or more years I've had it.

Yeah, believe me, there's no one more disappointed than me. The 639 Pros had/have well-known power supply problems (high failure rate). This has been well-documented on NAS forums. It really bothers me when a manufacturer can see there's a problem with the design or quality of their product and then hides behind their warranty terms. It was obvious to me when I ordered my replacement power supply and swapped them out that QNAP *significantly* upgraded the PSU (code: they knew they had a problem).


In any case, post P/S replacement my QNAP has been relatively trouble free (knock on wood), but the experience has soured me on their products. My next NAS (and my I/T department's next group of NAS units) will not be a QNAPs. As with all things, YMMV.

 

[Dan0myte]


Asustor requires you to step up to the professional 6-series to run Plex. and 2 and 3-series are meant for the average home user who will typically be using the direct output rather than streaming.

 

[BruceD]

I see no reason to use RAID on a home based system. Using hard drives that can be taken out of the server and read as standard NTFS drives while still protecting them with a parity drive (or 2) is a much smarter home solution.


If everything goes south on your server, you can still recover most of your content, which is likely untrue for a true RAID solution. Solutions like Flexraid and others can provide a single accessible storage solution with parity protection while still using a standard windows NTFS file system.


RAID just isn't a benefit in any home situation I can think of and if it fails catastrophically you can be totally SOL and lose all of your digital content with no way to recover (unless you have a backup).


I use RAID 5 and 6 servers daily at work, but I would never use them at home.

 

[ash_man]



Quote:
Originally Posted by BruceD  /t/1517545/is-it-better-to-build-a-media-server-or-buy-a-nas#post_24358066


I see no reason to use RAID on a home based system. Using hard drives that can be taken out of the server and read as standard NTFS drives while still protecting them with a parity drive (or 2) is a much smarter home solution.


If everything goes south on your server, you can still recover most of your content, which is likely untrue for a true RAID solution. Solutions like Flexraid and others can provide a single accessible storage solution with parity protection while still using a standard windows NTFS file system.


RAID just isn't a benefit in any home situation I can think of and if it fails catastrophically you can be totally SOL and lose all of your digital content with no way to recover (unless you have a backup).


I use RAID 5 and 6 servers daily at work, but I would never use them at home.

I think its really a matter of opinion, but no one should have any storage solution at home, whether its software raid or hardware raid, without a backup. Too many people believe raid is a backup and incapable of failure, this is simply a misguided belief. Traditionally hardware raid solutions have been the only viable solution and in some cases they provide performance increases. For businesses, hardware raid is still a popular choice however software raid solutions have begun to pique the interest of the IT community and some people are striking out with custom software raid setups. If you have any linux knowledge you can easily setup one of the many software raid solutions out there and some have become so easy to deploy that next to no linux knowledge is required. Still, if you want to buy an all in one name brand NAS, there are many options available at varying costs and performance. I have five name brand NAS's of varying sizes, the oldest being about 9 years old, I've had drives fail, as they will and one power supply die, but a raid failure or multiple drives fail simultaneously, not yet, can it happen, sure, but I have backups of everything so I am not so worried.

 

[funhouse69]


I agree 100% that no matter how you store your data you need to have a backup. Sure a RAID is great but there is still the possibility of a hardware / software failure, data corruption or even a virus that wipes out your data. Then you also have a physical aspect, like Fire, Flood, Earthquake, theft.

 

The question is how do you back up 10+ TB of data? Of course we all have our "Original" discs that we ripped our movies from right? Even then you still have the issue of physical security like the fire, flood, earthquake aka. I have Carbonite for backing up my documents / photos but backing up my movies is unrealistic even with today's relatively fast internet speeds you are still talking 1-2 hours + to upload a DVD Image, Blu Ray well now you are talking upwards of a day just for one and I am one of the lucky ones that has FIOS with a 35Mb/sec upload.

 

[dhodory]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Dan0myte  /t/1517545/is-it-better-to-build-a-media-server-or-buy-a-nas#post_24358001


Asustor requires you to step up to the professional 6-series to run Plex. and 2 and 3-series are meant for the average home user who will typically be using the direct output rather than streaming.

Based on the use of an Intel Atom processor on the 6-series, I don't think you'd be able to transcode 1080p content on Plex. So yes, you'd be able to run Plex, but not to its fullest potential - at least that's my understanding. Maybe the new dual core Atom processors *are* capable of transcoding 1080p on the fly - I just haven't read or heard that anywhere.