[wliob]

Hey all, I am new to the forum and the world of xbmc. I just want to say that I love it so far. It is great. I am using it on my mac pro right now and am waiting for parts to come in the mail to start my build. my question was about unraid. I am wondering if its the right thing for me to get as a media server. I keep hearing things about true raid and whatnot and it being better and faster than unraid but no matter how much i read i cant quite understand why. All I want to do is be able to stream media to 3 different media centers in my house and not have 1 drive fail and all my data be gone. The server must be able to have apps on it such as sickbeard,sabnzbd,subsonic,etc. I want to be able to start off with maybe 2 drives and then expand as the money comes along. Does this sound like the right route that I should be going for using with xbmc or should I go with something like windows home server or freenas or anything different?
Any reply would be welcome.
I also would like to know about the speed of unraid with streaming to xbmc.

[Manticore]

Id start here
Looking to Build Your Very First unRAID Server?

Its pretty much what I started with and now I have a 10tb Unraid server, not counting parity

As for plugins, look no further than here Influencers Plug-ins-[UNPLUGGED] Support & Download-Sab, CP, Sickbeard, + more!! . Its the one stop shop for all unraid plugins

I want to be able to start off with maybe 2 drives and then expand as the money comes along. Does this sound like the right route that I should be going for using with xbmc or should I go with something like windows home server or freenas or anything different?

Sound close to what I did. Started with 2 x 2tb drives and 1 parity. Just added drives from there on. Unraid is SIMPLE to use and I never used anything besides Windows before making my server.

The speed can vary on your setup. Your router, the quality of your CAT5 cables, loose cables, if you use a cache drive. Which I assume you will as you want to use plugins. Although a few of what I mentioned are human factors causing Unraid to be slow i.e using crap cables

I dont cache and I get about 35-45 MB /s. Not blazing fast but plenty quick for what I needed

When my drives were nearly full and I was adding big files like 1080p movies xbmx would buffer if it was playing something.
This can be solved be adding more drives, a cache drive or setting up Sab to download at a time when you wont be watching stuff.

I have a very limited knowledge of servers/linux but it was an easy setup. Any more questions and ask away

P.S. Check out the forums at limetech - Even though alot of xbmc users here use Unraid you will prob get more detailed answers there

[wliob]

Thanks alot for all your input. Does the unraid display all your drives or does it just show lets say one big drive of 4Tb and thats where you have all your folders with media? or is it like you have movies on drive 1 and tv shows on drive 2 and so on?

[fvtalon]

With a true raid setup the data is striped or divided between all the drives in the array so when you access a file it pulling say 1/4 of the file from each of 4 drives. This is fast but also unnecessary for media for a few reasons. For one thing because you're reading from 4 drives all at once it means you have all 4 drives operating for 2 hours while you watch a movie, this wastes energy and puts wear on the drives. Also because the data is split up if you lose one drive you lose 1/4 of every file on the array so you lose it all. You can use parity protection to cover a single drive failure but still... Imagine losing a 12TB library because 2 of the 2TB drives failed. The biggest thing though is that you just don't need the speed for media:

http://superuser.com/questions/434532/wh...eo-or-stan

The link says a 1080P stream is ~22 Mbps, with USB 2.0 = up to 480 Mpbs and SATA I = up to 1500 Mbps, 720p stream is more like 12 Mbps according to the link.

Even if a full bluray iso is ~50Gb (~50,000 MB) & ~100 minutes (~6000 sec) = 8.3 MB/s = 67 Mbps You should be able to easily support streaming even 3 or 4 movies on USB 2.0 never mind SATAIII over Cat5e off a real server.

[PobjoySpecial]

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[wliob]

On the unraid forum, I see people using raid cards with their unraid setup. What is the benefits of this ?

[N3MIS15]

On the unraid forum, I see people using raid cards with their unraid setup. What is the benefits of this ?

They're used to expand the amount of drives the system can handle. I have 2 raid cards, each capable of 8 drives. My motherboard can handle 8, giving me a total of a possible 24 drives.

[wliob]

I understand. Thanks for all the input everyone. Next thing I have to do is understand all this backed stuff. I hear some people are using a tv tuner back end like myth tv and then the front end is xbmc. Why would you even need to do this? I thought the new version of xbmc had build in live tv. Can I just put my tv turner( which I don't even know which to buy But I'll google that), in my htpc build. And let xbmc do everything. I think I need an xbmc for dummies book. Lol.