poofyhairguy Wrote:I am a fan of seperate HTPCs and NASes. Why? Because the best NAS softwares (Unraid/FreeNAS/etc.) all require dedicated PCs. With internal disks in a HTPC the best you can do is regular RAID, which means you probably won't use any parity protection and you will always be one disk blowing up away from losing data.
While I see where you are going, I dont completely agree as your response as it appears to group data protection with NAS to be the same thing. NAS or as you put it "best NAS softwares", does not equate to the products Unraid/FreeNAS/etc, rather those are pre-packaged ways of implementing NAS type functionality which also provide some some data protection capabilities as additional features.
NAS by definition is just network attached storage, and is independent of any data protection capabilities such as raid or or non standard raid-ish parity protection approaches. For example a samba share on a PC is NAS. But I do agree with the theory of segmenting HTPC type functionality, for example if you want the best file server (NAS), build a file server host, if you want the best presentation based host, build a client host designed for that purpose, hybrids create trade offs which is ok too.
In the most basic NAS configuration you have a DASD being abstracted by software which provides access to that media through a protocol such as SMB or NFS, to the network, this is independent of any DAS protection. This DASD can be protected by some kind of data protection technology such as standard or non standard raid type capabilities for example. Packaging those together to create a product like what Unraid and others have done in order to create value, but in many cases some if not all of those capabilities are available as components to in many OS distributions, for example linux with ZSF and CIFS/nfs, or standard software raid and CIFS/NFS.
Clearly packages like Unraid provide some unique proprietary value through their packaging, ease of use, software interfaces, and even in their propriety approach to data recovery, which btw I think is brilliant from perspective of a media storage server. The great thing about these "all in one packages" is they are designed to be an appliance model, which means they also have the negative trade off of being an appliance model or in other words they are a bit of a walled garden. Being an appliance model, does not equate to the logic of the reason to segment functionality, as I think you are arguing in your statement of "Because the best NAS softwares (Unraid/FreeNAS/etc.) all require dedicated PCs. ", but rather it is one marketing approach of supporting NAS services with some data protection. Additionally "best" is so subjective and presumptive, as it would mean you have some unique insight to understand the use case without presentation of said case. Alternatively it can be argued, that the requirements of residential based media file servers may not be compute intensive environments, and if one was going to keep NAS type services online 7/24 on a host, it would be useful to make those resources available for other purposes beyond the features of what a NAS appliance might provide. This is the reason, I think why folks like myself are less inclined to use a product like unraid. That being said I would love to see something like how unraid implements their raid4-ish style approach for parity protection of data inside of a standard model that could be implemented on a Linux distribution, from what I have read, I think it is an elegant and efficient approach to the use case of protecting media files, and I have found something quite like it under the more standard models.
