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A NAS server for my home

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Gwen7:
The next problem I have is how to convince my wife that I need to buy one   ;)
-dluby (December 07, 2010, 03:15 AM)
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i suggest you try, as best you can, to think like a woman:

first, contemplate why you need a new server. come up with sufficient reason to buy a new NAS.

next, convince yourself it is something that absolutely needs to be done in order to make things better and happier for everyone in your home. take your time getting there. this step is absolutely crucial so make sure you are completely convinced of the 'rightness' of what you want to do.

next, try having a rational discussion about the merits of upgrading and see if you can get her on the same page as you.

if that fails, wait a week...

then unplug it.

tell her it's broken.  ;-)

p.s. i own two pogoplugs. i can very much recommend them. one gets used for its intended purpose  the other has been rooted and reconfigured as a LAMP server. this way i can experiment with all my wordpress things before i use them to break my real website.  :-))

edbro:
You don't need to convince the wife. Simply order it, receive tracking number, track shipment, send wife to spa on delivery day. Hide NAS behind bookshelf. bada bing!

CWuestefeld:
I've had a D-Link DNS-321 for about two years, and I'm quite happy with it. It comes empty, with space for two drives, so you can easily get 2TB into it. I have 2 1TB drives in a RAID configuration for safety, because it's where I keep all my photos and that kind of irreplaceable stuff.

Its primary purpose was media storage, but I've had a heck of a time getting the whole system (including client-side) working the way I want. I only just recently got it right.

I started off using XBMC on an old XBox and a Netbook, but neither could quite handle H264 video at full framerate. My XBox died, which spurred me to replacing my DVR with a new DirecTV HR-24, but it turns out that this device can only do UPnP, not read from SMB. I tried using TVersity (running on my domain controller) to transcode and serve the media, but this didn't work very well, as TVersity has all kinds of compatibility problems.

My eventual solution was to replace both clients with dedicated hardware devices. I chose the Prodigi PD-100N because it's the only such device I could find that can read from SMB. This is now working wonderfully. It can play any kind of media I can throw at it (JPG photos; MP3 audio; H264 and DivX video, etc.) at full 1080p.

johnk:
I just started playing with FreeNAS, (mainly for data backup - I don't have anything to stream to....yet), and I have to say that it was exceptionally easy to get going.

An unused EPIA SP8000EG with 1GB DDR, booting off of a old 1GB Flash drive with, (currently), an old 160GB SATA HDD as storage, (encrypted UFS for which it's using the dedicated AES hardware on the motherboard).
-4wd (December 06, 2010, 06:29 PM)
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Another alternative in this scenario is NASLite, which I've used for years. It will run on more or less any old kit you have lying around. I didn't have any old kit when I built my first NAS five years ago, so I bought an old motherboard, a Celeron 700MHz processor (release date June 2000!) and 256MB RAM, less than £20 all-in, and it ran without problems until recently, when the power supply died. Rebuilding it now with slightly newer kit! NASLite is a bullet-proof, easy-to-use Linux-based file server OS for $29. Runs headless, so you can just stick it in a cupboard and forget about it.

4wd:
Another alternative in this scenario is NASLite, which I've used for years. It will run on more or less any old kit you have lying around.-johnk (December 07, 2010, 11:57 AM)
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I had a quick look at NASLite2 when I was wondering what to play with for my own NAS, (which will hopefully work out to be a silent sub-60W w/ 4TB unit), but it didn't seem to support DLNA which a large number of media players support, (plus it costs money and I'm a cheapskate  :-[ ).

FreeNAS also had a BT client and I can install SABnzbd on it for Usenet so that kind of pushed me in that direction also.

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