NAS advice anyone?

[mk01]

(28th Jul, 2013 09:43 PM)Skywatch Wrote:  I am still thinking of the Zyxel and a pair of WD red 3Tb drives. It should do me for now and if in the future things improve I might look at a PC based system, but for movies and music I think it'll do.

Skywatch, when I was looking for solution I almost went with NAS. But number of drives is limited and CPUs are slow and solution is not expandable to future. at the end I decided to assemble own system, bought box for mATX board, ATX AC and 6x3.5 drives. 4core AMD board+CPU was for 35, 2x8GB ram for no idea, 4x2TB drives for 4x80 and box 50, master silent pro AC which was most expensive among the other parts. You can't hear it in the room, it's fast like hell and you can run system as you like. drives are in mirror mode, so currently 2x2 mirror, still place for 2 drives and the mATX board has 2xeSATA connectors to allow attach of ext boxes to host drives as you need more.

at the beginning the investment is 2x more as with boxed NAS, but you don't need to buy new after two years. it's providing media storage as well as central backup destination for my other Macs. You will hardly use NAS box for this as well. It too slow and again capacity is limited.

At the same time it is hosting mysql db for xbmc video and audio library and of course one shared xbmc home folder which is used by all xbmc devices (installations I have - ATV, RPI, MACS). So actually adding new XBMC and configure it means just installing binary and mounting home folder.