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I run windows 7 on an AMD fx8150. As far as hd's go....I run 2 sets of drives in a raid aray (most mb will support). as each array fills, I remove them, place one in storage and place the other back in server on another port. works well and you always have backup for everything. I am up to 10 HD's in PC so far with 4 of those in raid array. If one ever dies, I just buy another to replace it and pull the backup from the closet and copy over. Also handles WMC pvr server, and serviio and Next PVR solution to feed live tv to 2 old xbox's as well. Doesnt even break a sweat.
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I was running a Linux file server, however without it quickly became a chore to manage due to my lack of knowledge. What I thought were simple tasks turned into wild goose chases for information, etc. I moved to a normal Win7 installation running FlexRAID and have been pretty happy. I was able to start with just a few drives and add as necessary (currently at 10TB). Recently I've been doing a hardware refresh of the drives and it's been as simple as copying files from the old drive to the new and replacing it.
As far as performance, it's been more than capable of serving up content to 6 installations of XBMC handling LIVE TV streaming as well as other ways of consuming content for viewing as the same time.
The Live TV streaming is what put me off to the Linux installation. Mediaportal has been easier to configure and served my needs well.
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Thanks both, I think I'm leaning towards a windows installation just because I'm so familiar with it - plus if I opt for a shared SQL library I'm pretty familiar with MS SQL so that would be easier too.
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Minimal Ubuntu (or whatever version you want).
Webmin for administrative tasks.
MHDDFS for Drive Pooling.
SnapRAID for redundancy.
Cost? FREE
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noggin
Posting Freak
Posts: 6,743
2014-04-11, 11:09
(This post was last modified: 2014-04-11, 11:10 by noggin.)
I use unRAID for a number of servers. It's a great fit for XBMC media serving duties - and offers a good balance between drive redundancy (it can have a parity drive which will allow you to reconstruct all data if one drive fails - but every data drive is still readable independently so if you lose more than one drive you only lose what is on the lost drives, not the whole array) There are also TV Headend plugins that allow you to run a TV Server on the platform. Probably better for DVB than ATSC - though there is some ATSC support in TVHeadend.
unRAID is mainly controlled through a web interface - and there are not usually any driver issues to worry about (you should use hardware that is known to work with unRAID - but there are lots of users who post their results) It's almost as quick to install as OpenElec!
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buzzqw
Senior Member
Posts: 136
debian server with samba and nfs
rsync script to mirror data drives to other drives
simply and efficent
BHH
HDConvertToX, AutoMKV, AutoMen author
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FreeNAS is pretty straightforward, but I don't know if there are plugins for the tv backends. I use FreeBSD personally because Linux just wasn't tricky enough for my liking. If you are okay setting up things like nfs or samba shares in linux already, it shouldn't be too much of a stretch for you to figure out mysql and a tv backend, but getting the equivalent of storage pooling going on linux might be an adventure.
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If you want to use Windows 8 for storage space for drive pooling I would be careful. I believe I read Windows 8 storage spaces HD when detached from a pool needs to be reformatted. I'm not 100% where i read it but I would look into that. For Windows you also have Stable bit.
