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Madaero · 2013-01-18, 05:07

I have a HTPC that has 3 HD in it 1 system and 2 Media drives (1 for movies and 1 for TV) I'm running out of space. I'm looking at getting a self standing 4-bay extrernal drive enclosure or a 8-bay drive enclosure that runs eather USB 3 or Esata. Anyone use something like this and does it work good. and what brand is the best to get?

T800 · 2013-01-18, 08:26

I went that route for while. I got one 4 bay, then another. It started getting silly having all these separate drives for all the media.
Imo if your getting to the point where your paying £100 for a 4 bay DAS it's time to start looking at buying/building a server. All content goes on the server and the HTPC see's it as one share.
The earlier you get on board with sorting out a server the cheaper it will be.

Madaero · 2013-01-19, 04:24

Ok thank you i might just do that. How fast does the server need to be? I have a older computer that only thing i use it for is a vent server. i could get a good case and transport that computer into a better case. or does the computer need to be fast?

ANNIHILATOR001 · (This post was last modified: 2013-01-19, 04:33 by ANNIHILATOR001.)

Not sure what your budget is. I went with a Dell 310 server ($500), and hard ware raid solution that supported expandable raids (so you can add more hard drives to your raid and it grows in size ). If you are keeping the Blurays in the raw format for video and audio quality.... they will eat up hard drive space quickly.

**Dougie Fresh** · 2013-01-19, 05:03

If you're just serving files, the server doesn't have to be much of anything but a place to put drives. My first server was an off-lease Dell GX260. Now I have an ASUS E35M1-I dual core 1.6GHz in a Lian-Li PC-Q08 case.

ANNIHILATOR001 · 2013-01-19, 05:20

(2013-01-19, 05:03)Dougie Fresh Wrote: If you're just serving files, the server doesn't have to be much of anything but a place to put drives. My first server was an off-lease Dell GX260. Now I have an ASUS E35M1-I dual core 1.6GHz in a Lian-Li PC-Q08 case.

The server it self doesn't need to be much of anything, it is the hard drives setup that makes the big difference.

fvtalon · 2013-01-19, 19:11

Look at Unraid, you can build an intel G530 based tower for about $250 + HDD that will support up to 10 drives. That's the route I want to go, it's just the + HDD cost that's holding me back at the moment. You need three drives to start and one should be a big one (3TB or so) for the parity so if you buy 3 x 3TB you're looking at around $360 which is a fair bit more than the actual server itself. However, once you're setup you can add any size drive at any time and it will pool in with the rest and have parity protection to protect from a single drive failure. In the long run it's a good way to do it, just a fair initial investment is the only hold back for me, especially since I just built a new HTPC.

T800 · 2013-01-19, 22:45

@ fvtalon
Do you need 3 to get started? Why not just one parity drive and one content drive?
I totally understand wanting to get a 3TB parity drive in there but for the others why not get 2TB's? By the time you can afford 3 x 3TB's 4TB's might be nearly in reach.

fvtalon · 2013-01-21, 16:30

Good question about 2 drives, I've been wondering it myself actually but haven't had a chance to figure out the answer. If you do need 3 drives you could use an old drive of any size as the third. I just say 3TB for two reasons: The Parity needs to be equal to or bigger than any other disc in the system. That is to say you can't use 2TB data discs and a 1TB parity disc but you can use 2TB data and 2TB parity discs. The second reason is every time I look at HDDs lately 3TB is the value leader. They seem to sit at $90 for 1TB, $110 for 2 TB, and $120-140 for 3TB which is only $40-$47/TB compared to $90 or $55 respectively.

Using 3TB limits you to the newest version of Unraid though too, which is not a bad thing but I think it's technically a beta release yet.

bluesky2006 · 2013-01-21, 17:15

I think because if you value your information and want to back up data, and you only have two drives, then you may as well just use one of them as a backup - parity drives only really make sense when working with 2 drives or more. That's when they do their clever maths trick and save you having to back everything up 1:1.