Be Excellent To Each Other

iTunes does seem better in OS X, to be fair.

Good find! I shall save that for later.

I haz a Netgear NAS Duo thingy. It's quite good but a little under powered by modern standards. It runs some sort of music sharing thing (bonjour) that allows it to be included in your iTunes or Media Player library. Don't actually use it daily but it's been pretty handy on the odd occasion. It also uses that UDPUUDOUUOU(DLNA/UPnP) thing that allows you to watch all the downloaded mooviiieees and music on your TV or on other stuff that supports the UPDUDUDU(DLNA/UPnP) ting. INIT!

Yeah, my (full) Buffalo Linkstation has all that stuff, but the TV won't pause when playing directly from it (but will if I play the same file via the PC, which is why I'm thinking about a server).
It's fairly quite to read and write, but deleting takes ages. It also has a built-in uTorrent client, which is the best bit.

The DNS232 I bought off the Doc is still running fine..

or is it a 323...

Hah! Yeah, it's a 323. Glad it's still chugging along. One of my better bits of kit, that was.

had problems with the itunes server but I think that is an itunes issue not an NAS issue..

Torrent client is brill.

I've got a 323 going spare you can have, Grim...

Alternatively, buy a HP Microserver if they're still running the cashback (Yup, £100 cashback).

4 drive bays, and the BIOS can be hacked to treat the optical and esata connectors as normal drives - 24TB should be enough for anybody (though it only comes with a single 250GB drive). I'm waiting delivery on a 240GB SSD and cable to turn into a new "wedged between the bluray and hard drive bays" boot drive.

And you can put a £20 graphics card in it to get realtime video decoding/transcoding.

So that's £110 total?

Very naughtily, they show the ex-VAT price without clarification, so it's more like £150, and you have to apply for the cashback post-sale (they're pretty quick about it, but not instant).

Plus £20 for the graphics card, if you want that (the onboard one isn't good enough for realtime decoding and the CPU is "challenged", though much better than one you'll get in a NAS)

Plus upgrading the RAM if you want that (apparently non-ECC works, so £30 for 8GB. I paid £30 for a 2GB ECC stick. Yay!)

Plus a buttload of disk (shitloads).

Oh, and a legitimate OS licence, unless you want Lunix.

So yeah, £150 for a functional machine, but more to make it properly good. I've not got realtime transcoded streaming quite working yet, because software authors are cunts, but it's still worth it. Playing the waiting game on drive prices though...

The Microservers are excellent value for money, but I couldn't find an OS that is as good for raiding as either the Drobo or Readynas.
Windows home server doesn't do raid-5, freenas does a version of raid-5 that isn't as flexible as the Drobo or even the Readynas XRaid.

Great little boxes if that sort of thing doesn't bother you though, I keep thinking I should get one and move all my overnight stuff and services off the iMac so I can sleep that overnight, but looking at the power figures an iMac with screen off is pretty similar to the Microserver, so it isn't really worth the hassle for me

There's a soft-RAID thing, I dunno if that does 5 though (the webpage says 0/1 but I'm sure there were more options than 0, 1 and JBOD). I'm RAID0-ing (in Win7 Home Premium) because fuck it.

Edit: The manual says RAID5 is possible. Editit: Oh, but the chipset may not support it.

I do intend to have an off-site backup of important stuff, but the machine is primarily for music and streaming of video ripped from my DVD and BD collections; iCloud is already there for music and most photos are in SkyDrive, for which I'll probably just spring the few quid for space >25GB.

Oh, and apparently the CPU has the right bits for Windows 8 Hyper-V virtualisation.

I'm sure when I looked into it further, the soft raid-5 had some limitations which put me off. Mostly likely around drive size matching IIRC. The soft raid-5 will only match the size of the smallest disk for each of the other volumes, so you can't just buy a couple of 3TB drives to increase capacity, you have to replace all the drives. The drobo and readynas are much more clever, as long as there is one other drive that is of equal size, any added drives will increase capacity, regardless of the size of the other drives in the array.

That's how RAID is supposed to work; in an array the smallest drive sets the limit. I don't see how it can work any other way (except JBOD, but like RAID0 that's not fault tolerant).

What you're talking about is something like JBOD-ing of multiple 2-drive RAID0/1 arrays. I suppose you could then have a parity drive for the JBOD array.

Also woohoo, my SSDs are here! Now I just the need the eSATA+USB => SATA adaptor and I can start thinking about installing the hacked BIOS for super-fast goodness.

Oh, the main fan is a constant-RPM quite-noisy thing, but a temperature-controlled one can be installed with an "easy" hack of the connector (because HP deliberately wired up the motherboard end wrong).

That's how RAID-5 works, but the Drobo and Netgear go further than that. I don't know how it works either.
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/datace ... ogies/2286

In my drobo at the moment, I have:

3TB + 3TB + 2TB + 2TB which gives me 7TB for data with disk failure redundancy.

If I had the same in a RAID-5 array on the Microserver, I would only have 6TB for data.

Raid 5 can use your largest drive as a parity drive, so you'd still get 7gb, IIRC.

No, wait, that's totally wrong, you stripe across all drives.

That article makes no sense; if it's keeping 3TB of space so it can rebuild a failed 3TB drive to usability but you also have 7TB available, where's it putting all the parity?

Yeah, I've been struggling with that. I'm kind of working on the assumption that it's striping 2TB of the data across all the drives, then striping the extra TB across just the 3TB drives. But that wouldn't give you 7GB either.

Magic, I tell you.

I've had a failed 3TB drive, which I replaced and I lost no data.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/D-Link-ShareCen ... 742&sr=8-4

This is pretty good £60 (with no drives)

Will take 2 drives so you could have 4TB in a mirror or 8TB in a stripe.

Drobo is very clever but you need more tha 2 disks for the benifits, with 2 it just forces a mirror along the lines of RAID, so a 2TB and a 4TB=2TB Mirror

Always been put off a bit as there RAID is hard to understand and they are not great over the network, at least the one my mate has isn't.

Well, yes, you need more than 2 disks, same as in any Raid-5 They all use one of the largest disks as redundancy.

And yes, network performance is pretty poor, I use mine connected directly to the iMac for that reason.

Sorry what I mean is that with 2 drives it forces a mirror there is no option for JBOD etc

Hung over today

Do these come with a USB 3 now? Or E-Sata?

It can't do that, because that disk might fail.

So you replace it and rebuild the RAID. That's why it's redundant.

Oh right! I get you

Yeah, no JBOD option, this is a good thing

I think the latest one is USB3 now.