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I have the MediaSmart with 4 * 1000 GB and upgraded to 2 GB RAM. I can copy movies to the server in 3-4 minutes and they stream perfectly. My other NASes (Synology and DNS) could take up to 30 minutes to copy a movie to them.
The WHS now also handles my mail, backups and more
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mpw222
Senior Member
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I've been using WHS for nearly a year now, and while it had a shaky start, most bugs have been patched and it now works extremely well (with xbmc or otherwise). The corruption bug was inexcusable (to the poster above, that's why utorrent gave you problems) and the duplication service (demigrator) caused really poor performance at first, but that was all fixed with the "PowerPack 1" service pack. Today I generally get 30MB/s writes, even to duplicated shares, and that's using Vista (other OSes are even faster).
Sure it costs money, and there are plenty of other solutions that would serve files via SMB or NFS for free, but that sort of sells WHS short. It's not as cool as ZFS, but the WHS storage pool is in some ways more useful for a home file server. You don't have to allocate drives to pools or worry about matching drive sizes for to do something like raidz. Also, since the storage pool just uses normal ntfs partitions, you can easily retreive your data should anything go wrong.
The backup service for XP and Vista PCs is extremely good - light on resources single instance storage of files that are duplicated on multiple PCs in the home, braindead easy to set up. The https access to your files and RDP over https to your home network is also pretty slick.
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Random question, for price im either debating doing a raid of 4tb drives inside a htpc case and have it all in one or is it better to do it in a separate box with free raid or unraid?
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For those who have WHS
Does WHS get connected to XBMC as SMB or UPnP?
Thanks
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mpm222
thank you for the info
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2008-11-25, 08:47
I stumbled upon this thread and thought i would throw my hat in the ring so to speak;
I bought one of those media smart servers to store all my videos and music on because it looked very cool and i got a great deal on it from work. after playing with it, i loved it, but it did not support x64 operating systems as clients, which is what i was running on all other pc's except one. not a big deal since i dont need automatic backup or anti-virus monitoring.
With xbox 360 it worked swimmingly for audio, video not so much due to limited codecs. the breaking point for me was my xbox. i use xbmc for EVERYTHING! and when i set up the network share, xbmc was able to see it, but when trying to connect it asked for a password. i tried no password, and i tried creating an account, no dice. my other major issue was that it seemed to be very slow when running utorrent in the background whether it was inactive or not. I returned it and fixed up a duron 2100 in a server case with 4 hard drives totaling just shy of 1.5tb
I really hate how much space it takes up in the closet, and the media server would take up so much less. it was quite a while ago that i played around with it, but do you know if they fixed the xbmc issues somehow?I dont think i could live in a house that didnt stream all my media to any TV i have (as long as theres an xbox under it lol)
I have nothing in the closet with it except the 2 printers and network cable, i dont even use a kb/mouse or monitor, i just remote it.
What im basically looking for is a way to make it take up less space and not look like an eyesore, while still keeping me productive media and torrent-wise. will the media server satisfy that now or am i still clinging to an impossible dream?
sorry for the long post, you guys just seem to have good opinions and knowledge of the WHS situation.
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mpw222
Senior Member
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The first thing you want to do is update your copy of WHS with the Power Pack 1 update, which fixed a ton on stuff, including adding support for Vista x64 (not XP x64, but there isn't a particuarly good reason to use that OS). It also fixed a nasty data corruption bug and significantly improved performance all around.
Regarding the utorrent slowness, PP1 should help out performance, but you should consider creating a directory on your D: drive (just a normal folder not one in the WHS storage pool) to house incomplete torrents. uTorrent can be configured to move completed torrents to a different folder, so you can still have them moved to a managed folder, but this way you avoid excessive work for the demigrator service that is repsonsible for folder duplication and moving files around within the storage pool.
Finally, how are you creating the user and shares in WHS? You need to create user with a password in the WHS Console and grant that user permission to the folder with your media in the console. This is just a friendlier version of the process you would normally go through to share a folder via SMB in Windows. After you do that, verify that you can reach that share from the PC you're going to run XBMC in the OS. On Windows for example you could type \\<servername>\<sharename> into the address bar in explorer (Ubuntu and OS X can both read SMB shares too). If that works, you should be able to add it to the sources list in xbmc.
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Cru
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I have been using WHS for about a month now and I love it. Like everyone said it does an amazing and simple job of protecting your media and backing up any home networked computers.
I was hoping to get some help or ideas for streaming video from a remote location using an Xbox (Home = Server ~ Away = Xbox). I have been using the FTP Manager with WHS and connecting that way, but I find it is way too choppy with video playback. Photos and Music work great though.
Can I do something with WHS to make this work (or is it limited with it's UL speeds) or should I switch to Ubuntu Server or FreeNAS?
BTW it is a custom built box... Athalon XP 2500+, 1gig ram, 4TB Storage and Gigabit.