What OS are you guys running?
Windows Home Server?
unRaid?
FreeNAS?
Just picked up
- drives and more ram
Really need it for backups and media storage any other features are a bonus maybe usenet stuff?
I like that configuration. I’m using a dedicated NAS. So much easier.
Any linux with Samba sharing would be good though
Only thing I was hoping for with an out of the box storage OS like FreeNAS etc is some kind of automated alerting etc.
Doing a 2TB Raid 1 for computer backups and another 2TB for media.
yeah that’s a solid plan. How many macs do you have? Some software that has Time Machine support would be optimal for that. Makes automated backups for those machines easy as pie. So that probably wipes Windows Home Server out.
I like the idea of FreeNAS, and I’ve heard good things.
3 Macs
3 Pcs
You can do some stuff to make a windows share useable for time machine.
Trying to get my main PC to not be a media server and trying to get backups of the other machines.
yea, you’re basically doing the same thing I did a few months ago. my machine was hovering at 95% disk usage from all the movies and crap that we had on our main machine. offloaded crap and got down to 60% or so.
The NAS is great. I like the flexibility of putting out multiple protocols (ie, AFP and smb) simultaneously. Also if you felt so inclined you could open a few ports up to the big I and get at shares via the web.
whoa that’s awesome, I like the sound of those plugins
Funny. I was just looking at this setup earlier today as my current 1TB setup is out of room for media.
I keep going back and forth Windows Home Server 2011 seems to just work out of the box.
However these Linux based ones have nice features.
I’m at a point where I don’t want to hack up my media/backup server to do weird shit lol
It should be here early next week I will get it running/test streaming and post up results.
Yeah there’s something to be said about easy. Especially when you’re counting on the data.
I’m running Plex media server on a Win 7 VM. Data is on OpenFiler via VM. Open filer is iSCSI’ed to my 2008 R2 server and shared from there. LOL
I am considering building a 2nd server for FreeNAS or something…just straight storage. Currently I’m sporting 1 good sized ESXi Server.
In for what you decide to go with. 
Lol yea I’m trying to keep it simple
I mess with complex shit all day at work don’t need more
Plex is pretty slick and will run on a basic Win7 box. Nice iOS client as well as Android of course. I dig it, worth checkin it out.
Will look now
FreeNAS 7 with sabnzbd/sickbeard/couchpotato/headphones has been pretty awesome for me. Frontend is an ATV1+CrystalHD card with the crystalbuntu OS. It’s not perfect but it is pretty damn close.
I’m running a Win7 machine for my server, works just fine and I don’t have to geek around if I want to do other things with it (rip dvds, convert file types, ect…). For the media center I have a windows XP machine running XBMC and Plex. (have not gotten the plex to work on the local network yet but works great from work or on my Android). I am planning on redoing the media center at some time though.
FreeNAS/unraid have the advantage of doing AFP out of the box so no hacking on the macs to use time machine.
Being mac heavy AFP/Timemachine could be awesome for you.
I think I just may build a FreeNAS box now. 
All the gear will be here Monday I downloaded Microsoft home server 2011 I might give it a shot first.