[billyad2000]

Sorry if this is the wrong forum

I have been looking around for a NAS device for quite a while now and a friend has sent me links for a couple of affordable ones (for me) he found on EBay.

They are both 2TB (2x1TB drives) and both support CIFS/SMB

The price seems on the cheap side so before I but I was just wondering if anyone had any advice about whether these are likely to work with XBMC or not, and if there is any other reason not to buy one of these.

The links are :-

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/External-Gigabit-N...dZViewItem (?232.95)

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/External-Network-2...dZViewItem (?211.95)

Any advice would be appreciated.

[Maxim]

I'm not a fan of all in one solutions like that. If I can't SSH or VNC into it, then I just don't feel comfortable. I'd rather an actual OS that is in control of the SMB, and store the data in another location.

My setup has a storage server which has several drives in a redundant and fault tolerant array. It has an iSCSI service and is used by a Windows machine. If the windows machine takes a poop, I can just move the iSCSI target to another machine much like a USB Drive.

[blittan]

as long as smb is supported then you should be ok

but i would rather build a cheap computer and run linux on it.. then you can add as many external / internal drives as you want

I use an Athlon XP 2800+ with 2GB Memory and 2.6 terrabyte of discspace. I even have a few old 10gb xbox-drives raided for backup purposes.

[TomJensen]

How good a solution is depends on what you intend to use it for. You didn't say so I'm guessing it's to store AV content and serving it over a wired network. If it's only one or two HD streams, then no worries. If you have an active household with lots of peeps wanting to access HD streams, then you'd have to pay more attention to throughput, and low-end solutions may not suffice.

It also depends on how technical you are and want to get. I'd suggest at least wiki on NAS and RAID to learn about the associated issues & capabilities. With a dual-drive setup, you won't be able to run RAID5 (striped disks w/ parity), generally the favored setup. If one drive fails, a good RAID5 setup will let you pull the drive and hot-plug another one in, and the system will recover w/o needing a reboot.

If you are looking just to get some big storage cap onto the network, and cost & speed aren't big concerns, then a ready solution like the above should work OK, and shop on price. If you want to spend time on the topic, I'd suggest perusing smallnetbuilder.com under the NAS category. They're a respected tech site that has good coverage of commercial solutions as well as articles/discussions on DIY solutions.

If you want to get your hands dirty and go the DIY route, I'd suggest something like this mini-server case that allows 4 hot-swap 3.5" drives, and using a mini-ITX board:

http://usa.chenbro.com/corporatesite/pro...?serno=100

The board should have at least single, preferably dual, giga-E and have hardware RAID (search Newegg). You can also run software RAID using Linux/BSD, although I'm not familiar w/ their capabilities or speed. Obviously, something like this will cost you more money over the 2-drive solution, but it's more capable, and you can start with 1 drive and plug more in as needed.

Lastly, I'd suggest perusing the forums in AVSforum.com. Lots of people have installed NAS into their AV setup, and you can benefit from their experience.

[slicemaster]

Sorry if this is the wrong forum

I have been looking around for a NAS device for quite a while now and a friend has sent me links for a couple of affordable ones (for me) he found on EBay.

They are both 2TB (2x1TB drives) and both support CIFS/SMB

The price seems on the cheap side so before I but I was just wondering if anyone had any advice about whether these are likely to work with XBMC or not, and if there is any other reason not to buy one of these.

Personally I try to stay always from off the shelf mini nas boxes like those for a few reasons. Fist is the fact that they are extremely underpowered. The processing power included in those boxes might be fine for streaming content to one XBMC endpoint but if you plan of having multiple streams going at once those types of boxes will usually choke because a single chip usually provides the processing for not only systems software operations but also disk IO and also raid parity calculations if the unit supports it. What this all amount to is the fact that the those types of solutions are underperforming from the get go when compared to a full blown NAS. My second reason is the lack of fault tolerance raid systems (or under performing ones for the reasons mentioned above). Bottom line, I wouldn’t recommend them, however if you are a little bit tech savvy with some old computer parts laying around I would recommend building a DIY rig like TomJensen said.... personally i prefer freenas, and even if you didn’t have the parts laying around you could buy all the parts necessary for building one that would out perform all the all in one systems currently on the market.

Her in the US you can pick-up all the parts for filthy cheap:
FreeNAS parts list for midrange build:
(Prices from Newegg.com not including shipping or tax)

CASE: CHEAP MID-TOWER CASE - $25
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6811156053

MOTHERBOARD: CHEAP ASROCK MOBO - $48.00
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6813157147

CPU: CHEAP AMD ATHLON X2 - $40.00
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6819103232

MEMORY: CHEAP OCZ DDR2 800 2GB (2X1GB) - $47.00 ($27.00 AFTER REBATE)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6820227198

HARD DRIVES: CHEAP 1TB WESTERN DIGITAL GREEN POWER - $110
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6822136317

Cost of 2TB configuration: $380.00 (with out tax or shipping)
Cost of 4TB configuration: $600.00 (with out tax or shipping)

Bottom line is you could build a better device for roughly the same price and the benefit of building it your self is the fact that it is extremely modular and can be expanded as your needs grow. All this considered it would also perform much better.

Just my humble opinion
Slice

P.S. the freenas community is just as great as the XBMC community in that there is always someone to help, but really it is a turnkey solution that would bring enterprise NAS and SAN features to your home.

[kizer]

I have the DNS-323 from D-link running with 2x500 gig drives. It uses a p500 processor and a gigbit connection. It runs with Debian and there are tons of hacks you can run on it with a few exploits.

I was downloading 3 torrents directly from the box, two video streams at 1+gig a piece and updating my library with Movie Info Plus and it worked just fine. Its all about buffering in my opinion. As long as it can fill the buffer then its all fine and dandy.

I've been there done that with the build it yourself server. Without saying it I guess I have to. I'm trying to go a little more Green in my house. A while back I had at least 2 servers running various flavors of *nix with multiple hard drives and other than having tons of storage the room I kept everything was pretty warm and I'm sure my power bill was loving it too.

Building it yourself is the best way, but if your a hobbiest and just want something simple go with a box. However if you want tons of storage and the ultimate method of controlling it and expansion definately get a small server box and run something like Freenas.

Heck I have a little FreeBSD p350 that streams pretty well as well. I think the only hiccup I've had in my setup to date is using a wireless connection. Sometimes it would work perfect and sometimes it would well.............

[billyad2000]

Firstly, thanks for all your replies and feedback.

At the moment I am only serving standard definition content to 2 XBox's running XBMC, I am using my main desktop as a server which contains 6x500GB HDs.
This PC is getting upgraded at the end of this year so most of my money is being saved towards that, on the other hand I am in desperate need of more storage, I'm using my windows partition at the moment to store TV Shows. I did consider getting several external USB drives but for my use a NAS device would be preferable since I could then put most of my mainstream media onto the NAS and the wife and kids would not need my PC running 24-7

@slicemaster
I did consider going down that road but cost was my main reason against.
While I could build a cheap FreeNAS system, it woud not be anywhere near as cheap as that. In the UK prices are much higher that that anyway. but even if they weren't, my experience of buying budget motherboards and budget memory is not good, for a device that would be running 24-7 with only occasional reboots, I think it would be prudent to get better quality components. In addition to that the specs you provided didn't include a PSU. Again this is another component that experience has taught me not to skimp on. in the UK that would be another ?40+
Either way, I would estimate that to build a quality system in the UK would cost me in the region of ?400, and then I would also be wondering if such a system is overkill for serving the occasional media file.

I estimate that I will be ready to start looking at building a HTPC in about 2 years. I have no real need at the moment since I actually have no HD content and XBMC on the XBOX happily fills my needs. When the time comes to do this I would imagine that I will be buying a case big enough to hold another 6-8 HDs. I imagine that in 2 years 2TB will be cheap enough to buy and that would give me a huge HTPC Server which will likely make the NAS redundant, but for now the NAS looks like it will suit my needs.

Anyway, I have decided to buy the GigaNAS, the reviews i've read are promising as well as a lot of custom mods. I also have had confirmation from another forum that it works ok with XBMC, as long as I don't brick it anyway, Wish me luck

[kizer]

Good luck and let us know how it goes. I never personally heard of that unit and now you got my intrest up. I haven't modded my as of yet either, but you can bet I've been checking out the sites to see what I can and can't do.