Why is Network Attached Storage (NAS) so frustrating?
Mar 10, 2016 | 2:22 am
#31
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It's just a networked drive as far as your PC/Mac is concerned.
Mar 10, 2016 | 9:49 am
#32
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Re power: Since I'm the only one using the server it spends a lot of time just waiting for me. I have it go to sleep after 20 minutes and it responds to wake-on-lan nicely, so that's how I roll with it. Depending on the rates in your area, and how much you actually use it, you could easily save yourself a hundred bucks a year in electricity costs and quite a lot of wear and tear on the drives.
Mar 10, 2016 | 11:36 am
#33
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I'm about to repurpose my desktop machine, which has also been pulling dual-duty as a file/media/plex server, to a dedicated server using either FreeNAS or UnRAID. The machine is completely over-specced for my daily use and is only comes close to its full potential when transcoding multiple plex streams simultaneously. My i3 laptop or even an Atom X5 powered tablet is powerful enough to handle my day-to-day web/email/office productivity computing tasks.
I currently have a 2TB media drive that's about 2/3 full, so I'll add more 2 more 2TB drives to create an array, but I have to decide if I want to add ALL the drives (4 new, 5 total, 8TB storage with single parity) now and use FreeNAS (ZFS/RaidZ doesn't support adding single drives after the fact) or pay for UnRAID now and have the ability to easily add single drives as needed. The other upside of UnRAID is it seems to have an easier, more matured, and more supported implementation of Plex as well as the ability to more easily run VMs.
I haven't made a decision yet, but UnRAID seems like it will be the easier approach on a few different levels but require paying for software which is always a hard pill to swallow when there are free options available.
I currently have a 2TB media drive that's about 2/3 full, so I'll add more 2 more 2TB drives to create an array, but I have to decide if I want to add ALL the drives (4 new, 5 total, 8TB storage with single parity) now and use FreeNAS (ZFS/RaidZ doesn't support adding single drives after the fact) or pay for UnRAID now and have the ability to easily add single drives as needed. The other upside of UnRAID is it seems to have an easier, more matured, and more supported implementation of Plex as well as the ability to more easily run VMs.
I haven't made a decision yet, but UnRAID seems like it will be the easier approach on a few different levels but require paying for software which is always a hard pill to swallow when there are free options available.
Mar 10, 2016 | 11:45 am
#34
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18 3TB and 6 2TB at present, and you miss redundancy -- it's 3 RAID 6s, and drive manufacturers and OSes measure TB differently, so:
/dev/md123 is the 6x 2TB RAID that's being retired (errr, will probably move into a gaming desktop ... no sense in wasting good drives, even small dated ones.)
As for the relative content of pr0n vs. other videos vs. non-video content, I'll simply say that there is plenty
A modern very-low-end CPU like the J1900 can get full bandwidth out of Gb ethernet as long as you've got reasonable disk for it to come off of.
"Ordinary" 100Mbps Ethernet? What decade are we in now? 
(I'll have 10GbE up and running at home as soon as my addition is done.)
There are 3 of us (and 4 when my son is a little older) using the server as a mega-DVR at home, not to mention a few remote friends, and it's running among other things my own main cloud storage (albeit totally manual via SCP/SFTP)
IF I let it sleep, I'd need another server (although it could be something tiny like an old router) to be able to do the wake-on-LAN remotely, and I'd have to explain wake-on-lan to my wife and the babysitter (any day now, to the daughter as well.)
Also, starting and stopping does a lot more wear on time than continuous running without spinning down. The oldest drive in my server has 45,382 hours (> 5 years) of run time, and under 200 start-stop cycles.
Code:
/dev/md125 197G 57G 131G 31% / /dev/mapper/vg_claudius-lv_home 22T 20T 1.4T 94% /home /dev/mapper/vg_claudius-lv_video 17T 16T 171G 99% /video /dev/md126 526G 207G 317G 40% /data
Code:
Disk /dev/md123: 7.3 TiB, 8001054310400 bytes, 15627059200 sectors
If all you needed was ordinary 100 mbs ethernet, pretty much anything can saturate that channel.
(I'll have 10GbE up and running at home as soon as my addition is done.)
Re power: Since I'm the only one using the server it spends a lot of time just waiting for me. I have it go to sleep after 20 minutes and it responds to wake-on-lan nicely, so that's how I roll with it. Depending on the rates in your area, and how much you actually use it, you could easily save yourself a hundred bucks a year in electricity costs and quite a lot of wear and tear on the drives.
IF I let it sleep, I'd need another server (although it could be something tiny like an old router) to be able to do the wake-on-LAN remotely, and I'd have to explain wake-on-lan to my wife and the babysitter (any day now, to the daughter as well.)
Also, starting and stopping does a lot more wear on time than continuous running without spinning down. The oldest drive in my server has 45,382 hours (> 5 years) of run time, and under 200 start-stop cycles.