NAS,media streamer/client,storage expansion,backup solution -want it all - in one!

[questionesse]

Hey there!
Not sure where to post this, since it relates to everything a bit, i'm thinking in building a home server, looking for a media streamer and also wifi/lan is needed. If this would fit somewhere else just shove it to there.

I'm having a really hard time deciding what to do. there are so many options out there and one seems to be better than the other

so here are my needs first of all
-I'm looking for a storage solution
more storage, not much, I guess 1TB would be enough for my needs
also a backup solution, as convenient as possible and incremental
also accessible on my network
-further on i'm looking for a solution to get my printer into the network, an old canon pixma ip 4000, my router is not interchangeable for one that supports that.
-I'd also like to stream my movies and music on my tv and on my stereo. just got an oldschool tv, no lcd or plasma, so no fancy hd things needed. but my tv and my hifi stand in two different corners of the room, so weather a wifi solution if applicaple and fast enough for that or a cable solution that is not loosing transfer quality over let's say 10meters.

and here are my first thoughts
I read about the xbox here as an NAS or media streamer solution, even if I didn't get all the tech details yet - can I combine both? can I add wifi to it?
If yes-
that would more or less everything except for the printer, and for that i could get a NAS adapter for it. Or am I missing a point here?

I thought about a NAS Raid housing like the ready nas duo,
but I'd still lack a backup solution, but a cheap usb external would do it.
but then I'd need the counterpart for receiving my media on tv or hifi

I thought about buying a media streamer that also works as a NAS with an option for a hard drive and an usb option for an external backup drive.
also here is no printer option as far as i know - or is there a device that has one?

the complete alternative would be building a home server out of my old desktop, with free NAS/Windows Home server, eventually exchanging some components for more energy efficient ones.
I like the idea and the flexibility, but i also fear to end up in a never finished project since i lack knowledge and a bit of time.
but i could host websites on it and everything, so this would be the real all in one solution which is upgradeable at all times
Here is what is waiting for potential usage:
-AMD athlon XP 2400+ dunno if this is useable for a home server
-GeForce4 Ti 4200 with passive cooling
-housing is a huge Cheiftec CS 601, but i have the room and it has plenty of HDD slots for nas, backup etc.
-power is supplied by a Seasonic S12-380 I guess I should get a more efficient one
-a 5.1 audio card from sound blaster as far as i remember so already a bit fit for audio

I really don't know what to do. you think i could get enough advice to try my own home server or would you recommend another solution for my needs? do you have specific ideas for the components in mind? let me know!

thanks a lot in advance - I'm curious as hell since i'm checking options for days now!

 

[thiggins]

You've covered most of the options.

Re: "media streaming". What you need on the NAS / server end, depends on what you are using for a media player. Xbox 360 and PS3 require a UPnP AV / DLNA server. Many other media players don't. If a media player can scan a network and show a list of available shares, then you don't need a "media server".

 

[Jay_S]

-I'm looking for a storage solution
more storage, not much, I guess 1TB would be enough for my needs

OK, build a server.

also a backup solution, as convenient as possible and incremental also accessible on my network

The server would handle that. For 'convenient as possible', use Windows Home Server. There are many other options here, but for pure convenience - especially if you have other Windows clients on your network - WHS is an easy choice.

further on i'm looking for a solution to get my printer into the network

Windows Home Server can handle that too.

I'd also like to stream my movies and music on my tv and on my stereo.

OK. Here's where I'm going to try to dissuade you from combining everything into 1 box. Sometimes 1 thing cannot fully replace the functionality of 2 things. Consider this analogy: all-season car tires. All-season tires try to be "good enough" in all conditions (dry, wet, snow), but in reality are mediocre in at least one of these categories (usually snow). If you design a tire for good dry performance, you give up good snow performance. Designing for good snow performance means giving up good dry (and usually wet) performance. Compromises need to be made for all-in-one solutions.

Your list of requirements would be easier accomplished by splitting the tasks among at least 2 devices: a central server and one or more media streamers. That way, each device can focus on what it excels at. And you don't have a noisy server or a printer sitting in your living room!

In light of the above, if you already have the Xbox you can use XBMC to make it a media streamer. XBMC can access networked shares of a remote server. Put the Xbox in your HiFi rack and run a composite (or whatever the Xbox offers) video cable to your TV, and audio to your amplifier.

If you do not already own an Xbox, there are loads of media streamers out there. Smallnetbuilder has reviewed a bunch, Engadgethd.com often reviews them, etc. You can build a HTPC for this as well - see AVSforum for ideas.

so weather a wifi solution if applicable and fast enough for that or a cable solution

I find wireless .11g (54Mb/s) to be acceptable for streaming AUDIO, but not video. Remember that wireless throughput is inversely proportional to the distance between transceivers - as distance increases, throughput decreases. Additionally, although the spec max is 54Mb/s, protocol overhead and distance reduce this to 20Mb/s or less. Again, this is good enough for music (and probably SD video), but it's a solution without a future (assuming you want to stream HD some day). Run cat5e/6 if at all possible. Even 100Mb/s is sufficient for HD video streaming.

the complete alternative would be building a home server out of my old desktop, with free NAS/Windows Home server, eventually exchanging some components for more energy efficient ones.

Here is what is waiting for potential usage:
-AMD athlon XP 2400+ dunno if this is useable for a home server
-GeForce4 Ti 4200 with passive cooling
-housing is a huge Cheiftec CS 601, but i have the room and it has plenty of HDD slots for nas, backup etc.
-power is supplied by a Seasonic S12-380 I guess I should get a more efficient one
-a 5.1 audio card from sound blaster as far as i remember so already a bit fit for audio

Yes! The athlon will be fine for a file & print server. Ditch the video card if your PC has on-board video (it's just wasting electricity). The Seasonic PSU is fine - probably more efficient than you think - Seasonic was one of the 1st PSU mfg's to jump on the efficiency train. Get rid of the audio card too - no need for this in a server. Other than that, this PC is a perfect 1st home server!

A note on FreeNAS - adding print server functionality to it is NOT trivial.

 

[questionesse]

If a media player can scan a network and show a list of available shares, then you don't need a "media server".

you mean the media player simply scans for free shares that are compatible and plays tehm, right? is there a special name to this ability if I check for players?
Does the Xbox do so?

@Jay S
Thanks a lot for this detailled post first of all!
You absolutely convinced me with your suggestion to spare my solution in 2 parts, the central storage solution and the media player. since the player is not that important, I might start with the server to make sure I dont have too much issues at once - then I can still search for a player solution it the server works.

So I guess it's building time.
I gotta check for my old computer again, if i'm not mistaken, it still has a Mainboard for IDE drives - if so, I gotta change that, I'm not gonna buy IDE drives nowadays.

Besides that, since I don't need to buy an expensive NAS housing or something, I got money on hand that I could spend for more energy efficient components - is there a large difference to affordable actual components to use for a home server?

So how do I get started? Is there a better page to discuss the details?
Maybe I should at least start a new thread or ask a mod to rename that one so that people find me to help.

I need the OS, it goes for around 70-80€ as a builder version in europe.
should I run it on a separate small drive and then having a data drive and one as backup of the same size?

then i need to choose my HDDs - as I said, I was looking for 1TB, maybe 1,5
I thought about this one
Western Digital Caviar Green 1000GB, 32MB Cache, SATA II (WD10EADS) respective the 1,5TB version.

Since I got some older HDDS flying around, I might throw them into an SATA enclosure and attach them externally via SATA by time, so I'd need a kind of a SATA card with ports?

But what then?
can or should i keep my dvd drive in? should i take it out? are they power consuming when not in use?

I'm gonna connect that old puppy again to run a system scan to gather a bit more info on what's there.

As you can see, by now I don't have much of an idea about this...

 

[thiggins]

you mean the media player simply scans for free shares that are compatible and plays tehm, right? is there a special name to this ability if I check for players?
Does the Xbox do so?

Yes. Xbox 360 does.

 

[questionesse]

heree we go
so it's still an IDE mainboard, that sucks
any suggestions?

Motherboard:
CPU Typ AMD Athlon XP, 2000 MHz (15 x 133) 2400+
Motherboard Name MSI KT4V (MS-6712) (6 PCI, 1 AGP, 3 DIMM, Audio)
Motherboard Chipsatz VIA VT8377 Apollo KT400
Arbeitsspeicher [ TRIAL VERSION ]
DIMM1: MDT Tech. MDT512M PC400 CL2. 512 MB PC3200 DDR SDRAM (2.5-3-3-8 @ 200 MHz) (2.0-3-3-7 @ 166 MHz)
DIMM2: 51016632117 [ TRIAL VERSION ]
DIMM3: 51036632117 [ TRIAL VERSION ]
BIOS Typ AMI (09/27/02)
Anschlüsse (COM und LPT) Kommunikationsanschluss (COM1)
Anschlüsse (COM und LPT) Kommunikationsanschluss (COM2)
Anschlüsse (COM und LPT) ECP-Druckeranschluss (LPT1)

Anzeige:
Grafikkarte NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 (64 MB)
3D-Beschleuniger nVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200


Multimedia:
Soundkarte Creative Audigy 2 ZS (SB0350) Sound Card
Soundkarte Realtek ALC650 @ VIA AC'97 Enhanced Audio Controller

Datenträger:
IDE Controller VIA Bus-Master-IDE-Controller
Massenspeicher Controller ST3WOLF SCSI Controller
Festplatte ST3200822A (200 GB, 7200 RPM, Ultra-ATA/100)
Festplatte WDC WD1200BB-00CAA1 (111 GB, IDE)
Device (Virtual DVD-ROM)
Optisches Laufwerk HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-H10A (DVD+R9:8x, DVD-R9:4x, DVD+RW:16x/8x, DVD-RW:16x/6x, DVD-RAM:5x, DVD-ROM:16x, CD:48x/32x/48x DVD+RW/DVD-RW/DVD-RAM)
Optisches Laufwerk TOSHIBA DVD-ROM SD-M1712 (16x/48x DVD-ROM)

 

[Jay_S]

OK, your motherboard is pretty limiting. Your onboard NIC is 100/10. No onboard SATA controller. No PCI-X. You could purchase a PCI gigabit NIC & PCI SATA controller, but it would likely cost you as much to just buy a new motherboard with those features (and many more) integrated. If money is an issue, I'd say use your current hardware for now to evaluate Windows Home Server (there's a free trial version) before spending any money on new hardware.

I have zero experience with WHS, so maybe others can help you there. There's also www.wegotserved.com, which is all about WHS.

When selecting parts for a low-powered file server, raw processing power is not relevant - ignore all AMD vs Intel fanboy-ism and look for the least expensive CPU & Motherboard combination that offers the features you need. See 00Roush's post in the "Building High Performance NAS / HTPC" sticky for general hardware guidelines.

Before picking a motherboard, though, you should determine roughly how much capacity you need. Many inexpensive MBs have 6 on-board SATA ports. My media server has 6; they're going to last me for a while (I only have 3 populated, and haven't filled a single 1TB drive yet). My MB can accept a non-graphics card in its PCIe-16 slot, so by the time I exhaust my 6 sata ports there should be a lot more 8+ port PCIe SATA controllers on the market.

Speaking of media streamers, I just ordered the Asus O!Play network media streamer. I was waiting/hoping the Popcorn Hours would drop in price, and then I saw the Asus today for $100 (found it with free HDMI cable from newegg!). The interface looks a little poop, but it's no worse than browsing folders in network shares. Anyway, it's half the price of the popcorn hour A-110 (though it's not quite as flexible). Not sure where you're located, but it's available in the UK.

 

[00Roush]

I haven't really spent much time on media streaming, backup, or really any other NAS features except high performance file sharing and printer sharing... so I will try to help with those parts.

You mentioned possibly reusing an old computer for your NAS so let me start there. I currently have computer here that has similar specs and I wanted to give you an idea of the performance you might see. It has a Athlon XP 2400 cpu, 1GB RAM, Nforce 2 based motherboard, Intel PRO 1000 MT PCI network card, and a 160GB WD IDE hard drive. I just tested it yesterday with FreeNAS .68 and averaged around 40 MB/sec reading and writing a 4 GB file. I think with Win XP Pro installed it used to be a bit higher than that but it should give you an idea. My guess is your old computer could manage about the same speeds provided you get a good PCI network card. If you wanted to use SATA drives just pick up a 2 or 4 port PCI SATA card. At the end of the day though your performance will be limited by staying with the older hardware.

As for building new... I am still trying to come up with solid recommendations for your criteria. The biggest problem is finding the lowest power usage. I have already spent the better part of two evenings on it. Asking myself what would I buy... damn it is hard. Ran out of time tonight to actually narrow things down enough make some recommendations. I should be able to by tomorrow.

00Roush

 

[questionesse]

Oh Roush, that is SO nice, figuring around for such a long time!

Hope I don't shock you by admitting that another thought that is spinning round my head since I realized, that I might need to change some components anyways is buying the acer aspire easy storage h340
there is a good deal out at the moment for 400€ and I could probably get it for 350. the offer is including 2x 1TB green caviar HDDS (but with 8mb cache) which are worth 135€ themselves.
Also the WHS is included, another 80€ as well.
I'd have to buy those things anyways to accomplish a self build
plus the sata card internal, plus one for external plugs, plus a network card, alltogether maybe another 50€ as well.

so the acer wouldn't cost much more than 100-150€ more and assuming that it will be hard to match this absolutely efficient home server benchmarks with a self build anyways, I'm reeeally undecided by now...
Not to mention all your time I'd save by not asking around for months all the time I get stuck on a self building project *lol

Plus I could try to sell some of the components of my old pc - at least the power and the housing and the sound card to squeeze some money out of it to compensate for the acer.

What do you guys think?

by the way - is there a power advantage on 8mb cache?
and other way round - is there any sense for 32mb cache HDDs in a home server? cause originally I was looking for the 32mb version...

 

[Jay_S]

[EDIT]There's a thorough review of the Acer NAS over at wegotserved.com.

That Acer h340 looks like a good deal, especially including the two 1TB WD drives. But only if you don't think you'll ever want/need more than 4 hard drives. In my case, I know I'll eventually need 10's of TB. Unless I win the lotto, that rules out every pre-built NAS box for me.

Here's some more inspiration: The [H]ard Forum Storage Showoff Thread - Post your 10TB+ systems
Those guys are nuts, power consumption be damned!

Searching for the lowest power components is tricky because there are so many variables. At this stage, all the low-end AMD and Intel CPUs have comparably low idle power consumption. They differ on peak load consumption, and Intel usually wins the performance-per-watt prize, but those topics are not relevant to file servers. We should focus attention on other components.

The WD green drives are perennial favorites, but the Seagate 5900RPM drives get decent reviews as well, and consume about as much/little power. You do not need 7200RPM (or higher) drives in a storage server unless you're serving many small files, or random read/write performance is important to your applications. 7200RPM drives' lower latency does nothing for sequential read/write performance (typical with large media files).

Power supplies can affect overall system consumption depending on how efficient they are at your operating load. Many new PSUs are 80+ certified, meaning they are at least 80% efficient between 20-80% of their operating range. So, a 400W 80+ PSU is at least 80% efficient starting at 80W output. Efficiency drops below that. I own this PSU (two of them, actually) - it's often on sale, dead silent, and has six SATA power connectors & 6 regular molex connectors.

Motherboard choice is the biggie, as it will define your future expansion ability & limits. Once you pick a motherboard, grab which ever 35W / 45W dual-core CPU is compatible from AMD or Intel.

In my case, my motherboard needs included:

1. High on-board SATA port count (many modern chipsets support 6). This delays purchase of an expensive 8-port (or more) SATA card.
2. On-board gigabit NIC on the PCI express bus
3. Support for ECC ram*
4. BIOS support for underclocking and undervolting the CPU and GPU.
5. Support for NON-video cards in the PCI Express x16 slot - this is critically important to me for future expension. Few (or no?) consumer motherboards use PCI-X anymore. Instead they offer a mix of PCI and PCI Express slots, usually PCI + PCIe-16x + PCIe-1x. Many boards (I'm looking at you Gigabyte) do not support SATA controllers or RAID cards in the PCIe-16x slot. If you own a board like this, you're often limited to PCI or PCIe-1x SATA cards. There are lots of these out there, but none with high SATA port counts (8 or more). Some PCI-X cards (including the inexpensive Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8) will work in regular PCI slots, though at reduced speeds.

I bought the Biostar A760G-M2+





* Regarding ECC memory, you may not care about this, but you should if your server runs 24/7. From this wikipedia article:

Recent tests give widely varying error rates with over 7 orders of magnitude difference, ranging from ... roughly one bit error, per hour, per gigabyte of memory to one bit error, per century, per gigabyte of memory.

Despite the wide range of error rates, a 24/7 server is more likely to experience errors simply due to it being on constantly. Since ECC ram is only a couple dollars more than non-ECC ram, it's cheap insurance.

 

[00Roush]

I agree with Jay_S.

I am a bit picky so when it comes to what I would pick I tend to look at all of the variables. For you though I would figure out if you plan on ever upgrading this setup at a later date or not. If you are not then feel free to get one of the cheapest CPUs and a last generation motherboard. For example a Intel Celeron E1500 CPU with a G31/G33/G35 based motherboard. Or a AMD Sempron 140 with a 740G/760G/780G based motherboard. If you think you might upgrade you might still be able to stay with the same CPUs but look at going with a more current generation motherboard. For Intel that would be a G43 or G45 based motherboard. For AMD that would be the 785G based motherboard.

Hope that helps...

00Roush

 

[benogil]

A760G M2+ , according to SPCR, is kind of funny, takes ECC, but not really. Seems supported in the bios, but not on the onboard chipsets.

Ben

 

[Jay_S]

Are you referring to the same SPCR thread I've posted in? That's hardly evidence of shaky ECC support.

If you have some hard evidence of this, I'd love to see it. Here's what I've been able to find.

1) Chipset support should not be relevant since the memory controller is built into the CPU since the introduction of the Athlon64 architecture.

2) This 2007 Athlon 64 datasheet (PDF) states that the on-board memory controller supports ECC. I couldn't find a newer revision than that...

3) The CPU supports ECC, the Biostar BIOS supports ECC - the remaining piece of the puzzle is the motherboard Mfg - they have to build in the extra electrical traces for ECC.

So number 3 needs confirmation. Biostar support people have been less than helpful in understanding this. The original poster from the SPCR thread has been searching for a way to test ECC functionality. If you know a way, please advise!

 

[questionesse]

hey guys,
I was almost sure to buy the aspire easy storage and meanwhile an old xbox is already on it's way.
But I just realized that there might be another interesting job I'd like to solve with my network combination
I'd like to use my notebook wireless while having the display content displayed on the TV....
At the moment I just have an old TV, but I'm planning to change to a LCD.
Is the Xbox capeable of receiving my notebook desktop as a remote desktop or is there another chance to bring content like that to my TV?
or is there a chance to do so with the WHS?

 

[Jay_S]

...meanwhile an old xbox is already on it's way

By "old xbox" I assume you mean the original xbox. If so, you should know that it will struggle with HD content. Again, I don't own one, so I'm just going by what I've read over at the xbmc forums. But apparently the original xbox is borderline powerful enough for 720p, and is not powerful enough for 1080p video. This isn't an issue with your current SD TV, but will be an issue if you buy an HD LCD. I didn't mention this sooner because you stated that you didn't need HD ability in your original post.

I'd like to use my notebook wireless while having the display content displayed on the TV

If you mean you just want to play content from your notebook on your TV, then yes - the Xbox will be able to see any folder you've shared on your network. If you mean you want to use your TV as your notebook's display, this doesn't require your network at all - just a long VGA (or DVI or HDMI or whatever you have) cable.

Is the Xbox capeable of receiving my notebook desktop as a remote desktop

Not that I'm aware of. Remote desktop, as I understand it, is a client-side application. Meaning you run it from the machine you're sitting in front of, and it displays the desktop of some remote system. The Xbox is not a fully-functional client PC.

Furthermore, while using your HDTV as a PC monitor is cool in principle, it's not that cool in practice unless you're sitting very close. I used to have a HTPC under our 40" 1080p TV; we sit about 10 feet away. I have perfect vision, and despite that, reading text (web sites, email, etc) is a challenge at that resolution/distance. So is accurate mouse pointing. Basically, it was too hard to use all the non-media functions of the HTPC, so I sold the HTPC and bought a media streamer.

Before you spend any more money... I suggested earlier that you download the WHS trial for evaluation with your old PC hardware. This way, if WHS does not do what you want you haven't kicked our hundreds toward the Acer.

 

[questionesse]

yeah, an original xbox. don't worry, you didn't mislead me anywhere or something like that.
it's cheap and sounds really promising except for the HD issue.
when I'm really about to go for HD content I can still see what's available on the market instead of buying expensive now and being outdated by then.

I knew that there's a cable solution to use the TV as a screen, but is there also a chance to get it working without a cable i.e. over the network?

if not I'm wondering if there'd be an efficient small living room computer like the acer easy storage h340 home server but with a vga out and an option for mouse and keyboard...