Network Storage Server for XBMC?

Yeah, you should see me banging my desk with my bright red hands and screaming at the screen

Not a fan of any mis/un/informed opinions to things like this where there is any 'right' answer or solution . Human nature to justify purchases and choices and things, I try and encourage everyone to try things for themselves. Thats all I meant

It might look like quality retarded babble, but I'm english

If you want to simply store data to be accessable from the network I would go for the Conceptronic C3SNAS. It comes without any driver and costs about 125 Euro.

You can put discs of any size in it (SATA), has a Gbit ethernet connection, uses about 7 watt under load and 4 watt idle, can be configured in two disc usage, single disc usage RAID and JBOB. The admin interface and firmware are solid and it's running Linux which creates te ability to install funplug and thus install Linux software. I'm using two 1GB discs. Performance is superb. I have a 100Mbit network, but I've read that people with a Gbit network can write to the disc with up to 20MB/s, when jumboframes are enabled (this can be done from the configuration interface).

Why do all that??

I have the perfect solution... and I use it!

MyBook! It's an external NETWORK hard drive. I have the 500GB edition, but they also come in smaller and up to 1TB. Just hook it up to your router, and bingo!

I use it with my XBMC to watch movies over the network (no lag what-so-ever), and I have a 50ft. ethernet cable from my router to my xbox.

You can use it on any PC/Mac (Windows, Linux and MacOSX all see it). Right now, I have over 300 movies, and I can play every one of them on XBMC, on my HDTV, and they look BEAUTIFUL!

hazeh Wrote:Silly thing to say?! You're using what? I've done some incredibly anally retentive bandwidth testing with a fair few systems btw. I could google a million problems for a million people running a million apps that were caused by a million reasons, what what that show?

With unraid you're using an 'unstable' software raid (I could suggest a fair few things to google that are slightly more concerning than samba speed issues on old versions of freebsd), with freenas you can use a 'stable' software raid, hardware raid or neither. I'm using some cheap hardware (its still a relatively modern skt939 system) for my main storage machine and have absolutely zero issues with stability. I've got a mix of IDE and sata drives, I'm not using raid and realworld performance over a cheap gb network is limited by each disks throughput.

Read the hcl, use intel network cards and consider things like bus limitations to get an idea what to expect in theory. I'd like to see any out of the box system work 'perfectly' with samba over a gb network without editing the conf.

What's "unstable" about unRAID exactly?

I LIKE the fact that unused disks can spin down, that my parity isn't striped, that losing more than one disk doesn't mean I lose it all, I like not having to have hotspares, I like that I can use normal recovery tools on a drive if I must. I like being able to buy whatever disk I want on sale and slap it in when I run low on space but still have parity protection. Best of all I like not having to screw with it all the time.

It's NOT the fastest setup for writes but it's plenty fast for reads. I run two unRAID, one is 12 drives and the other 8. Together this is pushing something North of 8TB. Uptime is regulated pretty much by how often I have extended power outages. Don't use it if you don't want to but try to be factual when you criticize something you've obviously not used.

This is fun!
I put it in quotes a for a pretty valid reason in my mind. If you think I'm lying about trying, testing and using unraid then why are you replying? I didn't have any problems with stability, but I did take the time to look at what actual software it is running... I could go on and on, but you've said in previous posts that you're not the biggest nix guy and maybe you're not familiar with the historys of various filesystems, softraid implementations etc.

I'd hoped that it might spur anyone interested in data storage into doing lots of reading, better than writing random defensive posts. I'd still call zfs "unstable" but I love it and use it and tell people about it.

It seems like you would LIKE every single storage product with more than a single disc in it btw.

I'd rather a slow system that I didn't have to crc check every 5 mins than a fast one

unraid is fine, maybe I should have just listed freenas, unraid, nexenta, flexraid, openfiler, clark connect, suriyan, opene, naslite, whs, etcetcetc as alternatives that are already done for you.

link433 Wrote:Why do all that??

I have the perfect solution... and I use it!

MyBook! It's an external NETWORK hard drive. I have the 500GB edition, but they also come in smaller and up to 1TB. Just hook it up to your router, and bingo!

I use it with my XBMC to watch movies over the network (no lag what-so-ever), and I have a 50ft. ethernet cable from my router to my xbox.

You can use it on any PC/Mac (Windows, Linux and MacOSX all see it). Right now, I have over 300 movies, and I can play every one of them on XBMC, on my HDTV, and they look BEAUTIFUL!

I've bought three of them. One for myself and theother two for my sisters (all 500GB). Mine had a hardware problem and the orher two software problems, as it seems. The software is terrible. Very slow and unstable. All three are back at the shop I've bought them. They are tested and marked as doa. I got a refund. I've hacked one of them (linux is running on it) to install funplug but I was unable to make the drive faster and more stable.

Check the reviews about the WD MyBook World edition, they are not! good. Trust me...sped 100 euro's more and you'll be happy with the CH3SNAS for quite a while (also check the reviews about this solution!).