Samdy Gray
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« Reply #45 on: Monday, January 31, 2011, 20:32:03 » |
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Bump (again). I'm sure none of you really care but it's only (!) taken me 6 months, but I'm (nearly) finished. Went to whack the OS on it today and realised I didn't have a VGA cable (  ) so currently waiting for one to arrive from eBay. Been fucking around with FreeNAS in VMWare to get an idea of what it's like and I have to say it's the dog's proverbials. Piece of piss to install, add a drive, format and set up shares. Good power options to spin down the drive too when it's not in use. And no need to fuck around with remote desktop (after the initial install), the UI is all browser based. In all I've spent: £30 on an Antec 300 case £17 on a mobo inc. CPU £15 on a PSU (surprisingly quiet) £39 on a 1TB Samsung F3 A grand total of £101. Plus some RAM I had lying around, a freebie DVD drive and a keyboard courtesy of PaulD. |
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Barry Scott
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« Reply #46 on: Monday, January 31, 2011, 20:41:26 » |
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Wow, sounds like a good deal. I might have to look into this as my NAS is full and pisses me off. (It can take 10+ minutes to boot and may or may not require a restart to get it connect correctly!)
I have some old stuff lying around, which I might have to consider using. I just need a Socket A processor, up to 400mhz FSB, a heatsink, some sata drives and a case that isn't fucking massive and can hold the mobo. Do those parts sound like overkill for a NAS? (It has 1GB of RAM as well.)
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Samdy Gray
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« Reply #47 on: Monday, January 31, 2011, 20:46:35 » |
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It's not necessarily overkill. You can make your NAS whatever you want it to be.
Personally I wasn't too bothered with speed or CPU power. I'll mostly be using mine to hold my music library, films and photos. FreeNAS has a built in UPNP service, so can easily be used to stream media.
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Barry Scott
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« Reply #48 on: Monday, January 31, 2011, 20:49:32 » |
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I don't even want it to be powerful, it's just that they're some spare parts I have lying around gathering dust, so it would be relatively inexpensive. So you can use it as a Media Server for the PS3 and what not? Nice.
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Samdy Gray
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« Reply #49 on: Monday, January 31, 2011, 20:52:31 » |
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So you can use it as a Media Server for the PS3 and what not? Nice.
Yep. But the media will need to be in a format that the PS3 can handle as FreeNAS won't re-encode it. |
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jonny72
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« Reply #50 on: Monday, January 31, 2011, 20:54:36 » |
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I just got a Synology 8tb array, cost about £560 in total. Worth it as I can finally get rid of all m external drives.
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Barry Scott
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« Reply #51 on: Monday, January 31, 2011, 20:56:42 » |
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Yep.
But the media will need to be in a format that the PS3 can handle as FreeNAS won't re-encode it.
Still, nice thing to have. Although saying that I had a media server on my mac and streamed to the TV and the PS3, simply because I could, but it had no appeal once the novelty wore off I'd done it once for about 10 seconds! |
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Samdy Gray
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« Reply #52 on: Monday, January 31, 2011, 21:00:00 » |
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Digressing slightly, but I currently use PS3 Media Server from my laptop. It transcodes .mkv files on the fly so you can stream them to the PS3.
Watched a couple of films in 720p and it's streamed them flawlessly with no breakup.
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Samdy Gray
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« Reply #53 on: Monday, January 31, 2011, 21:00:39 » |
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I just got a Synology 8tb array, cost about £560 in total. Worth it as I can finally get rid of all m external drives.
Not bad really when the 8TB of drive space would easily set you back £300+. |
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jonny72
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« Reply #54 on: Monday, January 31, 2011, 21:13:09 » |
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The Synology was about £260 and the drives about £300. Pissed off about the drives as I had to pay £40 extra to get ones approved by Synology - the cheaper ones weren't compatible. Still £70 a tb isn't too bad especially with all the features you get.
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jayohaitchenn
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« Reply #55 on: Tuesday, February 1, 2011, 11:46:03 » |
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Digressing slightly, but I currently use PS3 Media Server from my laptop. It transcodes .mkv files on the fly so you can stream them to the PS3.
Watched a couple of films in 720p and it's streamed them flawlessly with no breakup.
I use this software on my PC - it is fucking brilliant. Even works over my wireless network. http://ps3mediaserver.blogspot.com/ |
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Samdy Gray
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« Reply #56 on: Tuesday, February 1, 2011, 14:43:00 » |
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Yeah, that's the same one I use.
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jayohaitchenn
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« Reply #57 on: Tuesday, February 1, 2011, 16:56:00 » |
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Yeah I got that form your post.  Was providing the link for anyone else who may be interested. It's a really good bit of software, and a piece of piss to set up. |
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Samdy Gray
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« Reply #58 on: Tuesday, February 1, 2011, 19:55:03 » |
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I've spent the best part of 3 hours trying to get FreeNAS installed on my server and it's still not working. Doesn't seem to like working with old mobos / BIOS.  |
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Samdy Gray
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« Reply #59 on: Wednesday, February 2, 2011, 16:20:56 » |
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Gave up on FreeNAS, managed to install Openfiler this morning which does essentially the same stuff as FreeNAS but doesn't have uPNP (although that can be remedied by manually adding packages). Currently trying to transfer my media over to the NAS at a blistering 1.92MB/s. It reckons it's going to take 6 hours to do 33GB of music  |
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