Thetownend.com

So I've got 4 external hard drives now, all of which are pretty much full of various things - trying to think of the name of the tower/storage system type jobbie that I can plug them all into and just use the one connection for all 4 of them, but bugger me if I can think of what they're called.

Somebody please tell me so I can feel like a moron.

Dock, Caddy, Cage, NAS?

THAT'S THEY BUGGER!

Ta Venks.

Are you going to buy a ready built system or build your own?

I'm in the process of upgrading mine, hence the thread about RAM.

I haven't decided yet, so still having a browse. Building one shouldn't be particularly complex I'd imagine, as I've built several PC's before. I imagine a self-built would also mean you can upgrade it when necessary (as you're doing) to add more RAM/disk space etc. I essentially just need a bunch of USB 3.0 ports and space for an internal hard drive (or two, might as well leave room to expand)

My original NAS was an old Via motherboard with an onboard 1.4Ghz processor. It did the job fantastically as a file server with a few hard drives. You could use any old motherboard & CPU combo really.

You'd probably be better off removing your external drives from their caddies and connecting them directly to the NAS. You'd get much better speeds. Or it's an excuse to buy a few brand new 4TB drives to then just copy your data over and use the USB drives for backups.

Whilst the pre-built systems are great, they can somewhat lack in features and you could probably build your own system that will have much more flexibility for the same or less cost.

That's kind of the the route I was thinking of taking - I can dump everything on them and use the externals as portables/unplugged backups for my important stuff. As it is I've got a few old computer HDD's as well as three external hard drives that are not very well organised, but I don't have the spare space atm to re-organise them.

Just get a motherboard with a decent number of SATA ports and you'll future proof yourself to some extent.

If you've got some spare, worth thinking about taking a snapshot of anything you really want to keep and dumping it off site (office, parents etc). Backing up to a NAS is a great way of protecting against hardware failure, but offsite backups also protect against fire, burglars etc. Of course, you have to then balance how often you update the offsite, inconvenience etc etc and whether it's really worth it. Depends how much the data's worth to you, really

Google drive is free and provides 15gb of storage in the cloud and can sync live. Useful for documents you can't afford to lose.

Dropbox is 50gb and free

Dropbox is only 50GB if you have activate it from certain brands of phone isn't it?

I already back up to cloud - losing 3/4's of my years work at Uni in second year taught me a harsh lesson RE:offsite backups.

Yep for 2 years. Then presumably you have to pay or lose 48gb of space

I never read the damn smallprint.

Me neither. Damn, I've got about 6 weeks to find some free cloud storage for about 30+Gb of stuff.

I've wanted to build my own NAS for a while as I have 3 USB backups on my desk which is annoying and don't want to buy a Synology or the like.

What software do you use Sam? FreeNAS? And do you run the OS from USB or one of the drives as I'm sure I recall it being preferential to run it off  USB?

This is going to become a project of mine so any tips appreciated.

And I lost 250gb some years back when consolidating hard drive backups so have always been super proofed since.

I use CrashPlan by Code 42, which is great and live syncs my files online and to external sources. I also  hourly mirror the whole drive (incrementally) using Time Machine, which is priceless (I lost an SSD some time back) and love Dropbox for files I use between computers.

Currently using the original FreeNAS which has now forked as Nas4free. I have one small HDD for the OS currently because the old motherboard doesn't boot from USB.

I'll be upgrading to the newest version of FreeNAS which natively supports jails and plugins. Whilst plugins are possible on Nas4free they require a bit of tinkering. I plan on using Plex Media Server, hence getting a new mobo and CPU which can handle transcoding, so that I can do away with my old HTPC and replace it with a Roku.

I'll be running it off a 16GB USB drive which leaves me with 4 SATA ports on the motherboard for data drives.

I'm currently running a similar setup to the one Samdy has although for my storage server I'm using unRAID.  The Plex Media Server plugin works great on unRaid and will happily stream to the HTPC in the front room, Apple TV in the kitchen and the wifes iPad.  Love the central database Plex uses which keeps track of what you have watched and the progress, e.g. stop a film in the front room go up to bed and resume from the same place on the iPad.  The HTPC is set to send a WOL (wake on LAN) command when it is turned on and I also have an app on the phone and iPad to wake the storage server when I need to.  As I'm conscious about how much power I use the server goes to sleep when not in use and when it is on only the drives that are being used spin up.

Current spec of my storage server is AMD A6 cpu with 8 GB RAM.  It boots from USB and has a 3TB parity drive, 4 x 3TB data drives and a 250GB cache drive.  This gives 12 TB storage in total.  The cache drive has the plugins installed on for speed.

The thing I like about unRaid is that you can mix and match drives the only rule is that you parity drive must be equal to or greater in size than your lagest data drive.  I started out with my first server with 2 drives and just added drives that I got from PC's that were being thrown away at work.  If a drive should fail it is just a case of replacing it and the data will be restored from the parity drive.

Sounds like a nice setup. Is that one of the low power versions of the A6? It probably wouldn't take all that much power to keep it on constantly rather than use WoL.

I like Plex too, and the fact I can get a client box for £10 (NowTV).

I am having a few issues with Plex and the youtube channel since they udated the NowTv firmware though :(

It is a low powered version, but I'm tight so any savings are a bonus. Also keeps the noise down. WOL works perfectly and for backups etc I execute a script before they run to wake the server up.

Recently got an Intel NUC, core i5, 128gb ssd, 8gb ram. Installed Openelec XBMC and hey presto no need to download or store anything, all TV needs sorted. Have also chucked on a 320gb portable HDD just in case

That's where a fanless SoC board comes good. My new board should draw somewhere around 10-15w idle which is just £1-£2 per month to run 24/7.

Add in a picoPSU and it should be as damn as near silent, bar the chassis fan.