Network Attached Storage Solutions

[vexhold]

Hello Everyone!!

I am redoing my entire layout.

When i first got intersted in SageTV, I had illusions of grandure. I initially thought that I would have a single system that would store, play (directly to TV) and do all the fun stuff we can do on a PC.

I quickly learned that this is a pain in the gluteus maximus!!

I then changed it up when the HD200 came along... family was happy!!!

I have 4TB of storage internally on the server and am running out of room, and sata connections. I refuse to go USB as they are mostly filled and I don't want to share with the HDPVR.

So my solution is use a NAS!!

This brings me to my question...

IF YOU USE SOME SORT OF NAS, WHAT DO YOU USE?

Options out there that I have seen are...

Diskless NAS (Love these, but they are expensive when you get up to 8 bays which I would want)

Pre-setup NAS (kinda think these are a waste)

FREENAS (Don't know too much about it... anyone?)

FlexRAID (Someone said they were looking to try this. Is a it really a NAS or just an alternative to normal RAID?)

Those are basically the main choices. If I missed something let me know.

What I really want is tell me which of the options you use and give more detail on how you use it in your setup and maybe some model numbers and expected price ranges.

Money really isnt a problem, but I'd like to get bang for the buck.

Thanks!!

[stanger89]

If you're OK running another system, I'd just go unRAID.

[wrems]

There's always UnRAID too.

Edit: Stanger beat me

[ThePaladinTech]

unraid is what i would do. I've got a readynas that does the job, and a friend has a qnap that works well, another friend has openfiler setup on a server class machine.

[RocKKer]

I run RAID 5 on ubuntu server, portable to most linux's.

[naln]

I have run both NASLite and FreeNAS servers at some point of time to transfer sage recordings to.

Both are pretty sturdy and did a great job as file storage and server systems. The best part was their UPnP and AFP which provided directly served content for Xbox/PS3/Mac clients around the house.

But I have never written directly to NAS devices as a sage recording directory, especially HD shows. But all my routine maintenance file transfers from the recording and compression directory to the storage directory was always smooth even without using RAID setup. NASLite is a paid software....but I like it more than FreeNAS for ease of setup and stability.

[ThePaladinTech]

Originally Posted by naln

But I have never written directly to NAS devices as a sage recording directory, especially HD shows. But all my routine maintenance file transfers from the recording and compression directory to the storage directory was always smooth even without using RAID setup.

Good Point - is anyone recording directly to their NAS device? I'm not

[TobyG]

I've seen this question pop up every once in a while, and I like to share my setup, which has worked flawlessly since I set it up. My NAS (a QNAP TS-409) works great as an archive, but it's too slow to reliably handle live recordings (and the network is theoretically subject to traffic slowdowns). So I use it as an automatic archive location, moving recordings to the NAS once they've been recorded. Since I use RAID 5, there's redundancy if one drive fails, and it's easy to expand with additional drives. I wrote about it here:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...951#post332951

The QNAP TS-409 can be found much cheaper than many of the newest NAS devices (and some of even the newest NAS boxes still aren't going to be fast enough for direct recording, so do some careful research if that's your intention). The only thing I would add since my last post is that the QNAP firmware does not support ext4 formatting, which I've found is much faster at deleting large files (such as HD recordings)--TV shows that could take 10-15 seconds to delete on an ext3 partition take about 1 second on an ext4 partition. Thus, I installed Debian over the standard firmware in order to be able to format in ext4. I believe new QNAP devices support ext4 under the standard QNAP firmware, so that could be a reason to go with the newer boxes, if you're looking for a simple out-of-the-box solution.

[tmiranda]

I used to use NASLite and write to it directly from Sage. Very fast, very relaible, very cheap. The thing would run for months in a closet without intervention, reboots or problems.

[Bizarroterl]

I was looking for a NAS that was energy efficient, was easily expandable, inexpensive, had excellent online support, and had a good reputation. I selected unraid. It was a good decision.

[lotusvball]

I also use to use NASlite, but I switched to WHS. I had too many irq conflicts with NASlite. I have been, for the most part, happy with WHS.

[toricred]

For those of you using NASLite, did you record HD directly to it?

[tmiranda]

Yes, I could record two HD streams and two SD streams directly to my NASLite. That's with a system based onn 800MHz VIA C3 processor.

[tchapin]

Has anyone tried one of the newer versions of the DROBO? It's feature to auto expand the array is really attractive.

[vexhold]

WOW! Thanks for the replaies guys (and gals too)

So i have been looking at this unRAID. Specifically LIME-TECH premade machines.

Seriously only 1200-1300 for a 15 bay NAS solution?

This would make me insanly happy.

Of course more research needs to be done to make sure it will fit my complete needs.

Speed, Size, System Compatability (Mac, XP, Win7), Power consumption, Data Safety (both with loss and user rights), etc.

Thanks again guys, and if those using the unRAID solution could chime in with your experiences and how you use it, I would be greatful.

[vexhold]

If anyone else want to learn more about unRAID I found this video

http://revision3.com/systm/unraid

They mention doing some banchmark testing of:

unRaid
FreeNAS
Drobo
and others...

But alas I cannot find that.

One thing they do mention is that with unRAID there is a performance hit due to non striping.

Anyone have any comment on that?

[Bizarroterl]

They're right, there is a hit. If you're looking for a NAS for a business that has a lot of I/O, unraid is not what you want. It is plenty fast to support several HD feeds, which is all you need for HTPC purposes.

[vexhold]

They're right, there is a hit. If you're looking for a NAS for a business that has a lot of I/O, unraid is not what you want. It is plenty fast to support several HD feeds, which is all you need for HTPC purposes.

But I would not want to record to it correct? For that I would record locally and then archive?

That would be fine, but wouldnt moving the recordings to another location screw with them being visable in the past recording list? Wouldnt they then be mixed into my video collection?

[vexhold]

On a side note:

Just found Seagate 2TB 3.5" Hard Drives for $110 - $30 MiR = $80

Tiger Direct

Code: TD-5155

Good till 7/2/2010

God wasnt just yesterday $80 could only buy you a 40GB Hard Drive.

[Bizarroterl]

There shouldn't be any speed issues playing from it. Unraid reads 25MB-45MB/s. IIRC, a full 1080p Bluray stream is 7-8MB/s. Broadcast is less.

Writes are 15MB-25MB/s. Writes can be speeded up significantly by using a cache drive (22-40MB/s).

The reason for the wide ranges is that speed is hardware dependent. An array of old PATA drives won't be near as fast as some new 7200rpm SATA 3 drives.

I get writes in the 18MB/s range with a Celeron CPU and 5400rpm SATA drives (no cache).