I've decided flock it and ordered one, I'll sell my Buffalo gals with their 500Gb drives and this can become my new fileserver

Well it arrived this morning (although the dipstick delivered it to next door who kindly dropped it round), I'm just wondering what OS to install now and whether its worth putting a small/cheap HDD in the 5.25" bay to boot from but ideally I'd like something lightweight to boot from USB pen. Having said that Windows Home Server 2008 seems to be the best bet at the moment as it natively supports the hardware as well as software RAID 5, I could even get it installed on a small SSD as they are supported too. Server 2011 would work if I upgraded to 2Gb RAM but I'm not sure I would see any benefits to it.

FreeNAS doesn't look so great, Ubuntu is a contender, I'm not sure what else I could roll with. I looked at unRAID but to support over 3 drives they want $69 for a license fixed to your USB flash dive

what about naslite ?   that.s what I used to use.... it was bloody fast... years since I used it.... but you can have my serial number if you want ?

Cheers, I'll look into it

Oddly NASLite doesn't support software RAID, and the newest versions you have to pay for (I don't think your serial would carry across anyway).

Quote from: Clock'd 0Ne on March 25, 2011, 12:56:27 PM
Oddly NASLite doesn't support software RAID, and the newest versions you have to pay for (I don't think your serial would carry across anyway).

doh!   I'm sure it used to carry over !

if my serial is old, it can be "upgraded" for £1..... they're always sending me emails about it :-)


but I guess with no software raid there's no point ?

p.s. I guess you'd be better with something that could run bit-torrent anyway ?

Well I'm not too worried about running BT as I never really switch this machine off anyway, but there's a lot of flexibility in using Windows if I decide to put apps and stuff on (or fit a graphics card and make it a media center PC) and it will be easy to manage. The other options all seem like a lot of hassle!

if you want raid 5, why not just stick a raid card in?

Anyone considering using one of these as a media centre? I assume you'd need at least 1Gb of RAM and a low profile PCIe graphics card with on-board sound like:

http://www.misco.co.uk/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=503425&CatId=2696

Then an XBMC Live install and you'd be away? Full HD media player and home server in one for ~£150 + drives?

Quote from: sexytw on March 26, 2011, 11:50:49 AM
Anyone considering using one of these as a media centre? I assume you'd need at least 1Gb of RAM and a low profile PCIe graphics card with on-board sound like:

http://www.misco.co.uk/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=503425&CatId=2696

Then an XBMC Live install and you'd be away? Full HD media player and home server in one for ~£150 + drives?

reviews ive raid say the processing power aint up to much

Quote from: sexytw on March 26, 2011, 11:50:49 AM
Anyone considering using one of these as a media centre? I assume you'd need at least 1Gb of RAM and a low profile PCIe graphics card with on-board sound like:

http://www.misco.co.uk/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=503425&CatId=2696

Then an XBMC Live install and you'd be away? Full HD media player and home server in one for ~£150 + drives?

It comes with a gig anyway, would considedr possibly adding a bit more, but if you check the HUKD thread, there there are loads of people doing it and have suggested some suitable graphics cards, main thing you need to be careful of is voltage and power draw of the card..

Quote from: knighty on March 25, 2011, 21:32:23 PM
if you want raid 5, why not just stick a raid card in?

You'd have to spend half again on what I paid for the server for a decent RAID card with enough ports that does RAID 5, it's not really worth the effort when software RAID is just as good (the only drawback being needing the OS installed to keep it alive). I might fit one for expansion later on though once I've got to grips with it, I've not even had a chance to take it out of the box yet


Also it seems these make for great media servers/HTPCs and its something I would consider in the future, all I want it for is decent redundant storage. For someone not interested in RAID or that just wants JBOD you have a small, quiet unit with enough grunt and low power consumption providing you fit a HD decoding graphics card, plenty of success stories on HUKD as XEntity mentions. There's only a few days left to order in to qualify for the £100 cashback.

OK so who got one and who's using them?

Currently I'm getting about 43 watts power consumption at idle, I know that you can get 30 watts out of these things, but my 2 x Samsung F4s in RAID 1 aren't going to sleep, and looking at power consumption figures, this would get me the required drop! I'll probably remove them later and see what consumption I get then is.

I've also disabled indexing etc, so it's not that, the only thing I can think is that the RAID array isn't allowing them to go to sleep? But they would go to sleep in my external RAID NAS?

Any ideas? And anyway to force them to sleep, BTW Running W7 Pro?

Cheers!

I've got one, but I need to get Windows (going to be using Server 2008) installed and get 4 2Tb HDDs to RAID up - I've not got the cashflow for those at present! So it's currently sat doing nothing.

Re: the sleep issue, check that your power saving options  are set to power down the drives, it could be that this is all off.

I need a 5.25" caddy first so I can move the supplied HDD into the spare bay, i might try and sort all that out next weekend.