Okay, which of the options do I want? First, I thought I wanted a big external hard-drive. Then I started looking at smallish home servers (4-6 TB), now I’m thinking about a cheapish PC that can act like a server, but that I can also stick a bluray drive on for more backup and copying.
What I want to do:
I have a a decently large TV and spend far too much money on cable. I’d like to start utilizing the PS3 as more of a media center, and have a central place to access all my video files. My only computer is a laptop, and it’s revealing itself as a terrible place to store media (I don’t like to leave it open, and the future may hold an ipad…)
The idea of really going full Home Theater PC is daunting. But I’d also be able to put a TV tuner card in it, furthering my goal of a cable-free existence.
Honestly an HTPC is probably easiest to throw together, and pretty cheaply too. I just used an old spare PC and put a newer video card in it. The video card in your case would probably be optional in your case, if you were doing most of your media viewing on the PS3. Your main cost sink would probably be in the hard drives, if you’re looking for 4-6 TB of storage (It looks like 2TB hard drives are going for at least $140, and that’s in the cheapest range).
I’m sure someone here wouldn’t mind listing out the parts you’d need, if you want to give us a price range to work with.
I would use a PC as a server, running SME server or ClearOS (both Linux based). Shoehorning a MythTV backend onto either may be a bit tricky, but I’m pretty sure it can be done. I would use an Atom motherboard (single or dual core, but dual if you wish to transcode video) and 2Gb ram. Add storage to your hearts content. Set up UPnP and/or DLNA and your PS3 will access everything just fine (I use an Xbox360 and a Pinnacle Showcenter, and watch more downloaded video than live TV).
I use an old Dell Optiplex 1Gb RAM 2Ghz Pentium system with SME server - it runs like a charm and has done for years. SME7.4 is a bit long in the tooth, and I am looking at migrating to ClearOS or Ubuntu Server (for PHP5.3/MySQL5), but I have no real urgency, and I like the management of SME.
si_blakely - that sounds promising. I saw some pretty low-end dual cuore PCs at Best Buy (of all places) last night in the $400 range (with a monitor!) with 3GB ram, so I’m sure I can find something cheaper on TigerDirect or NewEgg.
If it’s being run with Linux, can I access it from a non-linux computer? I doubt it’d be a problem, but just wanted to check.
For recording antenna programs, one option is a TivoHD or whatever the new one is. It’s $12 per month but works very smoothly.
For your video files, get a external hard drive that supports UPNP. The PS3 will be able to read that.
Another suggestion, get a Netflix subscription and a free PS3 disc to access the streaming video. Then you’ll have access to thousands of movies and TV shows.
I get all the TV I can handle between Tivo and Netflix.
That would be fine. The Acer Revo range looks quite good, too, and the older models are really cheap. However, you would need to get external USB hard drive enclosures.
Well, with the Revo I couldn’t put a TV tuner on it, with no PCI ports. And the cost of external drives would be about the same as an NAS. However, I might want to later go with a Revo as an extender to run XMC, which I have a huge tech-crush on.
You can put a cheap-ass PC together with lots of slots for hard drives inside for a lot cheaper than you can get a good, reliable 4-slot or more NAS enclosure.
That’s what I’m doing, at any rate.
Actually, I’m gutting a PC and transplanting all of its innards to a different case, but potayto/potahto.
Sweet. Can you let me know what you end up doing, Knead? I’ll try to mirror it if it fits. We can do it Jack Bauer style. You know - if it doesn’t work, PEOPLE WILL DIE!
Well, for starters, I’m going with this case. Dirt cheap plus room for 6 hard drives inside, 8 if you’re willing to convert 5-1/4" bays to 3-1/2".
I’m hoping the motherboard and power supply from my Dell GX260 will fit inside. If not, I’ve got a couple of idle PCs that I’ll experiment with to try a fit that works. Hardware requirements for something that’s basically just going to be a NAS with a brain are pretty low.
If you mainly want a file server and a way to back up Windows PCs, a Windows Home Server is hard to beat. I use a Acer H340 and it’s fantastic. If you install Hamachi on it, you can even access it over the Internet. It doesn’t have RAID, but it does have folder duplication. (Assuming you install an additional hard drive. Duplication means the data is duplicated on a second hard drive.)
I’m not sure you can connect a Blu-Ray drive to it though. Windows Home Server is a server OS, and pretty specialized for that task. (It’s basically a stripped down Windows Server 2003.) You can’t use it like a regular PC.
Consider an UnRAID Server. It’s basically a server PC running a specialized flavour of RAID. Not that you should necessarily buy a pre-built server from them (unless you have the money), but you can build one using their specs for not too much money. Since I already had an appropriate case, CPU and mobo floating around, I just had to invest in RAM, hard drives and hot-swappable hard drive cages.
Like conventional RAID, you have a parity drive to provide fault-tolerance so you won’t lose any data if a drive fails but, unlike conventional RAID, if you lose 2 hard drives, you’ll only lose the data on those 2 drives, not the data on the entire array. Also, by all accounts, re-building the array taking substantially less time.
I’ve been running mine for about 6 months and it’s been rock solid. Haven’t lost a drive yet but it’s good to know I’m covered.
Another good suggestion is the SME server mentioned above. We’ve been using one running RAID5 at my office for about 5 years as a file server and gateway and have had no problems. Had a drive failure a few years back and replacing the drive and re-building the array was quite simple.
There are, of course, dedicated NAS servers you can buy which run their own proprietary software but I never saw the need when a relative cheap PC can do the job just as well.
Depends entirely on how hard the external drive enclosure is to open. Look for screws hidden behind rubber feet and labels and the like. Chances are, it’s held together by little friction tabs that aren’t always easy to open once the enclosure has been assembled. You may find that it’s worth it to leave the external drive an external drive and just buy another drive for internal.
I’m still in a little holding pattern to get my project going, but it sounds like you’re making good progress.
I’ve been looking at WHS for the stuff I want to do. Is the duplication how they resolved the shadow copy problems? Because one of the things I really want is shadow copies - I’ve gotten used to that at work & they’re terrif.
Yup. And everything these days comes with Windows 7, which apparently already has tons of built-in networking/server(ish) functions without having to set up an actual server. No, I wouldn’t get off-site access, but that’s not my main goal.
Many Linux based servers will now do Shadow Copy - it has been integrated into Samba (the linux CIFS/SMB file server) for a while. Mine does, and it is really good (although I have not seen a unix shadow-copy client yet, for my Ubuntu laptops).
My biggest gripe about WHS is the cost, but I like playing about with Linux systems, and the price is right
Meh, depends on if you’d rather spend time, or money. Personally I don’t have the time to be messing with building a home server and all that crap. So I bought a Drobo to store all the data. Right now I’m up to 6TB, with 3TB usable storage, the rest used for redundancy. That takes care of the immediate data storage, and data recovery if a drive fails. Now they have the “S” version with network support, when I bought it, you had to get a separate controller that hooks it up to the network. Either way, it stores all the music, videos, and pictures I currently have.
I was using an AppleTV for viewing the media on my TV. But while the interface is slick, I got tired of constantly having to struggle with keeping iTunes running on a dedicated laptop (a requirement if you want to stream media from some external source), so I’ve recently switched over to the WDTV Live, which is not only smaller, but can connect directly to my NAS, without having to have a dedicated computer running. Sure the interface isn’t as smooth, but it works just fine for what we need it to do. Plus it can play a host of formats, unlike the AppleTV.
So that’s my set up right now…personally even if I did go with creating a computer server for the media storage, I wouldn’t bother with a TV card, any TV show you want to watch is almost sure to be bit torrented the day after it airs. Just set up an RSS subscription to your favorite show and it’ll automatically download. Lifehacker.com has a bunch of articles about how to set up that sort of thing automatically. Note that I’m not advocating the download of pirated content, just shows that have been broadcast over the air, recorded, and then made available to others.
For backup of my data, I need to look into an online solution. I don’t just want two copies of everything in the house. So I may look at something like Carbonite or other online service. Good Luck with whatever you choose.
