[thisisepic0727]

I'm looking for a nettop that will work well with XBMC and either Netflix/Hulu. Any thoughts on these two systems? Is one better then the other, or am I good either way?

Or should I just man-up and build a system from scratch?

Thanks for the help.

Zotac MAG Intel Atom N330

http://www.amazon.com/Zotac-MAG-Intel-NV...592&sr=8-1

Acer AspireRevo AR3700

http://www.amazon.com/Acer-AspireRevo-AR...111&sr=1-1

[maxinc]

Zotac is ION1 while R3700 is ION2. I could be wrong but I think the ION1 is somewhat easier to setup in Linux. Plus I like more the way Zotac looks.

[mr.sparkle]

One comes with peripherals, the other has better WAF. Performance-wise, you won't notice a difference.

[thisisepic0727]

Zotac is ION1 while R3700 is ION2. I could be wrong but I think the ION1 is somewhat easier to setup in Linux. Plus I like more the way Zotac looks.

I'm sorta new to all of this. Is there any benefit to ION2 over ION1 that might make me consider it despite being more difficult to setup in Linux?

[thisisepic0727]

One comes with peripherals, the other has better WAF. Performance-wise, you won't notice a difference.

So it's fair to say that performance wise, they are almost identical. Is that true for Hulu/Netflix as well?

[wvmci]

I have the Revo 3700. Setup was as easy as plugging in and downloading xbmc. Works great for playing blu-ray rips. I've played rips from external hard drive and streamed through network from my main PC. Sometimes I get a buffering problem which usually goes away with restart of main PC. Not sure why that happens. Have not tried netflix yet because I use my playstation 3 for that. I heard that netflix uses better servers for their playstation and xbox users vs PC users. Not sure that is fact though.

[thisisepic0727]

I have the Revo 3700. Setup was as easy as plugging in and downloading xbmc. Works great for playing blu-ray rips. I've played rips from external hard drive and streamed through network from my main PC. Sometimes I get a buffering problem which usually goes away with restart of main PC. Not sure why that happens. Have not tried netflix yet because I use my playstation 3 for that. I heard that netflix uses better servers for their playstation and xbox users vs PC users. Not sure that is fact though.

Thanks for the mini-review. Quick question, does anybody have any recommendations for external hard drives (via USB) or NAS suggestions? If I want to play 1080p movies, am I going to have any streaming issues from either of these storage setups?

[maxinc]

Quick question, does anybody have any recommendations for external hard drives (via USB) or NAS suggestions

Depends on how large your library is. If you keep 20-30 movies at a time, view and delete them, you can probably get away easily with any USB drive out there. If you thinking hundreds of movies, dvd and bluray rips etc, best long term NAS companion for xbmc is IMHO, unRAID.

If you settle for anything in between, probably best to have something with gigabit ethernet interface, in case you may want to stream to multiple devices at the same time.

Performance wise, they all can handle the playback requirements.

[jdwoods]

Can anyone advise what the easiest/cheapest way to get started with unRaid would be? I would personally like to have a device with 4-6 drives... 1.5TB and 2.0TB... I would like to idealy spend a maximum of 300 on the unRaid box...

[thisisepic0727]

Can anyone advise what the easiest/cheapest way to get started with unRaid would be? I would personally like to have a device with 4-6 drives... 1.5TB and 2.0TB... I would like to idealy spend a maximum of 300 on the unRaid box...

Now that we're discussing unRaid, I'd like to know more about it as well. What hardware is required and how does it work?

I'd had to reiterate this, but I'm new to this stuff and I've only been running XBMC off my laptop with about 20 movies and a handful of TV shows.

Thanks everyone for your input!

[maxinc]

Have a look here, a brief description from the developers http://www.lime-technology.com/home/51-d...-solutions

Basically, supports almost any hardware, you can combine any number / types (IDE or SATA) / sizes of disks you want and the data is all protected by a single disk. For example you can have 1T + 250G + 500G + 1T + 750G protected by a single 1T(parity). Parity drive needs to be at least as large as the largest disk in the array.

Main thing to consider is to choose one with many SATA ports as possible. 6 or 8 port motherboards are common in these configurations but they can be expanded with additional SATA controllers. CPU could be very cheap like a celeron or something. There are lists of tested mainboards, controllers and all sorts of hardware, on their wiki.

My last unRAID I built for my father costed about £120 for hardware, £35 for a 6 drive license and the rest is HDDs which get cheaper every week.

[thanamesjames]

What is the downside to having a large movie collection over a usb hard drive?

[maxinc]

What is the downside to having a large movie collection over a usb hard drive?

If the drive fails (and HDDs do fail) you will potentially loose a large quantity of data which will require a lot of time and some effort to reacquire.

If you loose 20 movies, they can be reacquired in an afternoon. For 500 movies is a different story and I bet you would wish you had an easier way to restore all that data, should a disc fail.

With a USB hard drive, could be a simple matter of knocking the drive over to make it unusable.

[super_sobbie]

I currently use a Home built FlexRAID solution. I had many older part laying around and didnt really need to buy too much. I used an old case, with 2x2TB WD Green Drives (yes I know), 3x1TB drives, 800GB Drive, I ended up buying an eSATA external 4bay cage and stuck my 3TBs and 800GB in it. I am running ubuntu server off a USB drive. So far it has worked great, fortunately I have not had to test a full drive recovery with it so I can not speak to that completely but from what I can tell it works fine.

I use 2x1TB as parity and that leaves me with 5.8TB of space. since Flexraid is only a snapshot raid as soon as files change the raid has to be rescanned. it makes it pretty easy to do and I have been updating mine for a long time. Every now and again I will rebuild the entire thing from scratch just to be safe.

But it is cheap and easy for me. Also I use XFS (yes I know about that too but too late now) if that makes a difference.

I do have a AR3700, although I can not say too much since I had it for about 2 weeks (worked great playing all my movies, with a little studder in one 1080p movie I have, but only in a short action part). I did not try netflix but hulu did not look good on it at all. But then again my entire machine died on me after the 2 weeks.... I did just get the replacement from UPS the other day, and can not wait to get some time to set it back up.

SoBBie