NAS help

[Lisa]

Hello. Firstly, I don't pretend to know very much about pc's, I've only been 'into' them for around a year and have only built two. So if I say anything that is stupid or a no-no please point it out to me because I really want to learn this stuff.

As it stands at the moment I have two usb-powered Passport drives, a 60gb and a 500gb. I have a 1tb MyBook and two 1tb Elements. All socket powered. As you can imagine this means a lot of clutter with the enclosures and the associated cabling.

I also can't get, for the life of me, the Homegroup within Windows to work properly (besides, I don't want the main pc to have to be on all the time if I'm not actually using it) so I am considering getting a NAS, have been for some time. I'd prefer to get one with the drives already included as I've read a lot of things regarding compatibility issues with NAS enclosures and hdd's.

On top of this most of the drives are pretty much full what with night-out videos, clips from the bullet cam when mountain biking, pictures, music and lots of other misc stuff.

I just want to keep everything in one location, that I can then view on the main pc or the media pc or my laptop. Files will also be easier to find. If I can get a decent capacity NAS I can then just copy everything across and use the external drives I already have as back up's and pack them away. It's going to have to be a decent capacity NAS because, including the space used on the internal drives, I already have around 3tb of content. I can't believe how quickly the space gets used up!

I've found this one clicky . It's slightly over budget but by all accounts it is a good one.

Any thoughts on the linked NAS? Know of a better one?

Is there a better way I don't know about?

Thanks for any assistance offered.xx

 

[Grizzly]

I personally have a Seagate NAS220. Acts as one big hard drive that you can view from all PCs on the same network, which is what I think you're looking for.

It's £100 less than the one you linked and will also come with Seagate HDDs, which are reliable, whereas I don't know what HDDs you'd get with the iomega NAS you linked.

It has one less USB than what you were looking at, but is that worth £100 to you?

See it here.

 

[sheroo]

If I was in your position, and I wanted to learn more about PC's etc, I'd also consider building a Home Server. You can then add hard drives as your storage needs grow.

2 x 2TB WD greens - £180

B75 Motherboard - £80

i3 2100 - £90

2x2GB DDR3 1333 - £21

PSU - BeQuiet 400W Gold - £40

Home Server 2011 - £36

That comes to £411 - add a case of you choice, and you've got a nice little project to tinker with.

 

[hmmblah]

I'm still in love with the HP Microservers.

 

[Lisa]

Thank you both for the quick responses!

So, Grizzly, for over a £100 cheaper I can get the same amount of storage. And having it recommended by someone who has one always carries more weight. You're correct, I do just want to be able to view it from all the pc's. Is it pretty good then?

Thanks for the alternative idea, Sheroo. Didn't even realise that was an option. But I don't think it's one I'm going to go with because I just want a box I can plonk next to the media pc and forget about. And I think two pc's (three if you include the laptop) are enough. It is rather cheap though isn't it.

Actually, what benefits over a NAS would I get by doing it that way? I ask because I have a Silverstone Strider 600w psu, 8gb ram, a Q6600 (from an old computer), a Thermaltake heatsink, new skt 775 motherboard and a white 600T case and a 5830 gpu, all of which I've never used, just bloomin' opened them. I wouldn't use the case of course, bit big, but could sell it for a smaller one. So all I'd really need to buy would be the Home Server 2011 and grab a couple of hdd's. Or am I missing something? It can't be that simple can it?

Sorry, I realise I've contradicted myself but seems a shame to have all those components just laying around and you've given me the info and idea now, Sheroo.

Thanks both.xx

 

[dipzy]

If I was in your position, and I wanted to learn more about PC's etc, I'd also consider building a Home Server. You can then add hard drives as your storage needs grow.

2 x 2TB WD greens - £180

B75 Motherboard - £80

i3 2100 - £90

2x2GB DDR3 1333 - £21

PSU - BeQuiet 400W Gold - £40

Home Server 2011 - £36

That comes to £411 - add a case of you choice, and you've got a nice little project to tinker with.

+1. This the option i'd go with as well, plenty of room for future expansion

 

[hmmblah]

Thank you both for the quick responses!

So, Grizzly, for over a £100 cheaper I can get the same amount of storage. And having it recommended by someone who has one always carries more weight. You're correct, I do just want to be able to view it from all the pc's. Is it pretty good then?

Thanks for the alternative idea, Sheroo. Didn't even realise that was an option. But I don't think it's one I'm going to go with because I just want a box I can plonk next to the media pc and forget about. And I think two pc's (three if you include the laptop) are enough. It is rather cheap though isn't it.

Actually, what benefits over a NAS would I get by doing it that way? I ask because I have a Silverstone Strider 600w psu, 8gb ram, a Q6600 (from an old computer), a Thermaltake heatsink, new skt 775 motherboard and a white 600T case and a 5830 gpu, all of which I've never used, just bloomin' opened them. I wouldn't use the case of course, bit big, but could sell it for a smaller one. So all I'd really need to buy would be the Home Server 2011 and grab a couple of hdd's. Or am I missing something? It can't be that simple can it?

Sorry, I realise I've contradicted myself but seems a shame to have all those components just laying around and you've given me the info and idea now, Sheroo.

Thanks both.xx

A NAS is pretty much turnkey and they will use less electricity than a PC used as a server. A server, however, will give you more options. You could host a game server from it as well and do transcoding on the fly if you ran a media server. A NAS traditionally has slow read/write speeds as they use software RAID controllers. Large file sizes will be fine, but when you start transferring small files, the transfer speed is horrible.

 

[Lisa]

Thanks for the reply, hmmblah. I have to be honest I understood most of that but there's some that I didn't. Would you mind explaining 'transcoding'?

I'm not too bothered about electricity consumption. Regarding the read/write speeds, most of my files are video from the bullet cam or the camcorder. Although I do have a few gb of music, I assume these small files are what you're referring to?

 

[hmmblah]

Thanks for the reply, hmmblah. I have to be honest I understood most of that but there's some that I didn't. Would you mind explaining 'transcoding'?

I'm not too bothered about electricity consumption. Regarding the read/write speeds, most of my files are video from the bullet cam or the camcorder. Although I do have a few gb of music, I assume these small files are what you're referring to?

Transcoding allows you to convert files on the fly to play on devices that don't support the codec the file is saved in. Let's say the video file is a .wmv and your ipad can't play it. The media server could change the file type without having to re-encode the file.

By small files I meant really small files like text documents. With MP3s and movies you probably wouldn't have anything to worry about.

Edit: Just to add, you should probably hang on to those external drives to backup your media on to. I backup things like music and pictures. My wife has about 40GB worth of pictures she has taken and would kill me if I lost them. I don't bother backing up my ripped DVDs. I could always recreate them if I had to.

 

[sheroo]

Transcoding is when you are recoding a file to a new format so that it can be read by a different device, think converting an xvid file to mp4 or say flac to mp3.

Yes its as easy as you say, buy a copy of Home Server 2011 and a couple of disks and you are away. The only thing you really need to think about is your backup strategy, i.e. making sure you have a 2nd physical copy of all of your most important data, and then your most important stuff even archived onto DVD.

Another advantage of the Home Server route is that you can automatically wake up your PC's at night and backup all of their data. So if say your media center fails, buy a new drive and restore it back to the way it was in less than half an hour.

 

[Grizzly]

Thank you both for the quick responses!

So, Grizzly, for over a £100 cheaper I can get the same amount of storage. And having it recommended by someone who has one always carries more weight. You're correct, I do just want to be able to view it from all the pc's. Is it pretty good then?

Thanks for the alternative idea, Sheroo. Didn't even realise that was an option. But I don't think it's one I'm going to go with because I just want a box I can plonk next to the media pc and forget about. And I think two pc's (three if you include the laptop) are enough. It is rather cheap though isn't it.

Actually, what benefits over a NAS would I get by doing it that way? I ask because I have a Silverstone Strider 600w psu, 8gb ram, a Q6600 (from an old computer), a Thermaltake heatsink, new skt 775 motherboard and a white 600T case and a 5830 gpu, all of which I've never used, just bloomin' opened them. I wouldn't use the case of course, bit big, but could sell it for a smaller one. So all I'd really need to buy would be the Home Server 2011 and grab a couple of hdd's. Or am I missing something? It can't be that simple can it?

It does what it's supposed to and not a lot more. If you wanted you can stream music and videos to an Xbox or host a wiki from it but you can do the former with almost any PC and a server would be better for the latter.

But if all that hardware you have is spare you're better off building your own server, it would be cheaper and you'd be able to do more with it in the future.

And as sheroo said as you want to learn more about PCs it's going to give you a lot more experience than any little NAS box would.

LinusTechTips / NCIXcom made a server tutorial recently that is very good but may go into more depth than you need to.

 

[Lisa]

Can't thank you three enough for the help given, it's greatly appreciated.

I'm off to find that tutorial, Grizzly.

Just waiting on the Server software, the hdd's and the new case (chose the Lian Li PC7). xx