Home Network Setup Advice

jaytobe

My cheap and useful iomega 2tb media player packed up and I'm looking for a new home network setup.
The hardrive was salvaged and now sits in a caddy.

I have several USB external drives now and want to know the best way to have this information accessible to iPhones, computers and smart TVs alike.

Main use is movies, photos, music hub for zone system and business files.

- do specific media players like kdlinks connected to USB drives run the risk of wearing out the hard disks if permanently connected?

- should I get a NAS and put all information on it? If so, what type is best considering I'd like to get at it for external access?

Thanks for any advice.

Nelbert

Key questions -

Capacity needed?
Redundancy (how annoyed would you be to lose a drive/s and would any data be irreplacable such as photos)?
Budget?

To give you an idea I use to hang a load of external hard drives off my main windows pc.
Recently got a Synology DS1813+ and those same drives are now being migrated to a 20+TB RAID. My windows pc will now just live on as the Live TV server for the house.
I've around 9-10TB of TV shows, approx 6TB of HD Movies, 150GB of Music and about the same in photos.
I consider the photos and music irreplacable and back them up from the 1813 to an external drive.

The TV and Movies I could simply rerip or if I was doing it in bulk likely download.

jaytobe

Nelbert wrote: »

Key questions -

Capacity needed?
Redundancy (how annoyed would you be to lose a drive/s and would any data be irreplacable such as photos)?
Budget?

To give you an idea I use to hang a load of external hard drives off my main windows pc.
Recently got a Synology DS1813+ and those same drives are now being migrated to a 20+TB RAID. My windows pc will now just live on as the Live TV server for the house.
I've around 9-10TB of TV shows, approx 6TB of HD Movies, 150GB of Music and about the same in photos.
I consider the photos and music irreplacable and back them up from the 1813 to an external drive.

The TV and Movies I could simply rerip or if I was doing it in bulk likely download.

Thanks Nelbert.

Capacity about 10Tb needed.

Agreed on the photos/music, I nearly lost these after the Iomega went. These are now on 3 different external drives.

Budget, flexible for the right setup but was thinking up to 1.5k incl drives.

Are these units easy to set up? Will smart TV's etc.. read this unit across the Ethernet.. Had a lot of trouble with Iomega, DLNA type was different.

Not sure how PC works then?

Nelbert

jaytobe wrote: »

Thanks Nelbert.

Capacity about 10Tb needed.

Agreed on the photos/music, I nearly lost these after the Iomega went. These are now on 3 different external drives.

Budget, flexible for the right setup but was thinking up to 1.5k incl drives.

Are these units easy to set up? Will smart TV's etc.. read this unit across the Ethernet.. Had a lot of trouble with Iomega, DLNA type was different.

Not sure how PC works then?

1.5k is good!

Depending on your needs you should be able to get a very good and expandable setup.

Having had the Synology a little over a week I'd recommend it and a couple of 4TB drives.

I slapped in a couple of 4TB drives in JBOD initially and copied all my external drives over. I then opened the external hard drives and luckily all were on the Synology's compatibility list so put them all in and built an SHR volume (synology's version of RAID compatible with different HD sizes).
Copied from the 4tb drives onto the SHR Volume and then expanded the volume by adding the 4tb drives.
Time consuming and takes some planning but end result is worth it.

It's got built in media server apps (video, photo and audio).

My front ends are;
Zotac HTPC with Openelec in the sitting room
Xbox 360
PS3
WDTV Live

Zotac and XBMC are very impressive and will be taking over from the WDTV in the bedroom shortly, once I've the money to buy another.

DS1813+ €869
4TB HDs €160 (each so decide yourself how many you want to start off with)


I'm already looking yearningly at the DX513 expansion unit to add another 5 4TB drives to my setup and build a media collection to rival the ages (Recording 1080i live tv is HDD space hungry but Picture quality is top notch).

It's my opinion and my experience in what seems to be a similar migration to what you are looking at but I'm looking forward to using the 1813+ as my storage hub from now on.

WAF - if it's a factor for you - Synology have audio, photo and video apps for iphone etc. My boss likes having all our photos available everywhere and she enjoyed watching tv shows and movies from our collection while she was in Dubai last week (although she didn't know it was stored and streaming from my favourite new bit of tech at the time....). Audio app is great for me and will save me money on my next phone upgrade as I won't need a 64gb iPhone for a decent selection of music as I'll be able to stream it all from home (you can also set it to cache your most recent 2000 songs played!).

Nelbert

Forgot to mention; fully working with my samsung smart tv / dlna player but that tv has the xbmc setup hooked up to it so I don't actually use the "smart" functions on the tv for anything other than the remote control app for volume!

vibe666

Two thumbs up for synology, you really can't go wrong with them.

I'm about to buy a 12 bay DS2413+ to upgrade from an 8 disk home built freeNAS box and a 7 bay thecus n7700.

One thing I would say is not to even consider anything less than raid6 when deciding how many drives you need.

I had a drive fail in a 7 disk raid5 set and very nearly lost it all during the rebuild when a 2nd drive started acting up.

When I get the DS2413+, it'll be raid6 with a hot spare and critical data (paperwork, family pics and vids etc.) backed up to an external drive, plus an off-site backup to the cloud.

Nelbert

vibe666 wrote: »

Two thumbs up for synology, you really can't go wrong with them.

I'm about to buy a 12 bay DS2413+ to upgrade from an 8 disk home built freeNAS box and a 7 bay thecus n7700.

One thing I would say is not to even consider anything less than raid6 when deciding how many drives you need.

I had a drive fail in a 7 disk raid5 set and very nearly lost it all during the rebuild when a 2nd drive started acting up.

When I get the DS2413+, it'll be raid6 with a hot spare and critical data (paperwork, family pics and vids etc.) backed up to an external drive, plus an off-site backup to the cloud.

Any way to migrate from SHR (Raid 5) to SHR2 (Raid 6)? Hoping to do it when I get the 8th disk and put it in? Don't think there will be so I may have to wait till I get my DX513 and have the space to backup the stuff before scrapping the volume.

vibe666

Not sure on a synology, but I couldn't do it on my old thecus from 5 to 6.

I ended up backing up all the data externally to individual disks, then creating a 4 disk raid6 set, then moving the backup data from one standalone disk to that, then adding that disk to the raid set and increasing the size to include the new disk, then moving the data from the next disk to the raid before adding that and so on until I was done.

It was a fairly nerve wracking few days! :pac:

Nelbert

vibe666 wrote: »

Not sure on a synology, but I couldn't do it on my old thecus from 5 to 6.

I ended up backing up all the data externally to individual disks, then creating a 4 disk raid6 set, then moving the backup data from one standalone disk to that, then adding that disk to the raid set and increasing the size to include the new disk, then moving the data from the next disk to the raid before adding that and so on until I was done.

It was a fairly nerve wracking few days! :pac:

hmmm... I didn't have the option for SHR2 due to data juggling constraints (was starting with 3 x 3TB disks and then expanding from there). When I get the DX513 and accompaning disks I may take the plunge then as I should be able to do a full backup at that point and dump and remake the existing volume.

Photos and music are always gonna be the real backup priority though.... TV and Movies are easily replaced...