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Ask Slashdot: Best Kit For a Home Media Server?
First time accepted submitter parkejr writes "I started off building a media library a few years ago with an old PC running Ubuntu. Folders for photos, ogg vorbis music from my CD collection, and x264 encoded mkv movies. I have a high spec machine for encoding, but over the years I've moved the server to a bigger case, with 8 TB of disk capacity, and reverted back to Debian, but still running with the same AMD Sempron processor and 2GB RAM. It's working well, it's also the family mail server, and the kids are starting to use it for network storage, and it runs both link and twonkyserver, but my disks are almost full, and there are no more internal slots. The obvious option to me is to add in a couple of SATA PCI cards, to give me 4 more drives, and buy an externally powered enclosure, but that doesn't feel very elegant. I'm a bit of an amateur, so I'd like some advice. Should I start looking at a rack system? Something that can accommodate, say, 10 3.5" drives (I'm thinking long term, and some redundancy)? Also, what about location — I could run some cat6 to the garage and move it out of the house, in case noise is an issue. Finally, what about file format, file system, and OS/software? I'm currently running with ext3 and Debian Squeeze. Happy with my audio encoding choice, but not sure about x264 and mkv. I'd also consider different media server software, too. Any comments appreciated."
If he just wants to go cheap and its gonna be stuck in some garage anyway i'd say white trash it like we did at my last shop. Me and the boss took a couple of the biggest cheapo ATX cases we could get our hands on, took out the motherboard mount and cut the frame on one, and finally a couple of small weld stuck them together. We ended up with something like 16 SCSI drives in that sucker for a total of 2Tb when most folks were still getting 80Gb drives. with those babies loaded with every single driver for just about every piece of hardware up to that point it was quick work to reload a PC.
:As for the board I'd go with something like a cheap AMD board with a nice cheap Phenom low power quad. you can get a Phenom I quad for $55 at Starmicro and add a couple of Gb of DDR 2 for maybe $25, board for around $40 and finally a decent HSF for around $15.
So when you figure in the cases which with no PSU can be had for less than $20 a piece from many places like Geeks you are looking at a final total of around $185 for a quad with 2Gb of RAM with an add on card for adding more SATA slots. Sure it won't be the prettiest thing around but if its just gonna be serving files from a corner somewhere who cares? I'd add a little more and get a full size board with lots of SATA slots and 3 PCI slots for adding more SATA cards and you'd have a thing you could load to the brim and with the low power Phenom quad you'll have plenty of power for controlling the whole deal and maybe even it doing some of the transcoding work via scripts at night when its not serving files.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Just because you don't understand the request doesn't mean it's gobbledegooke, it means your knowledge is limited.
Personally, I don't trust any auto-encoding solutions as they easily go haywire. I'd suggest doing that all by hand.
Ext3 is fine, & a rack mount is a necessity. If you want smooth operation of the system, at least 2 network cards are a must (I run 3, 2 bonded for media/SMB, 1 for management & VPN). I'd suggest having a decent 16 port switch in the house & running the 2 (or more) cables to the box.
For DLNA I just run miniDLNA & for torrents I've just set up uTorrent with a web interface. There's very little my desktop actually does.
1) I've never had problems with using Handbreak for chapters. But one anecdote is about as useless as another for this kind of thing. .mp4 but not the subtitles is the PS3, and all indications are that it was deliberate. So fuck Sony and the horse they rode in on (slung underneath). On the other hand, PS3 doesn't support mkv at all
2) Only system I've ever found that supports
3) This is not a good thing if your goal is to play back the content on any system but the one it was made on. Ever gone internet hunting for that one weird codec that you used for a few months a couple years ago? No? Me neither because I'm not dumb enough to think that 'can jam anything into it' is a good thing in a media format.
4) This is... debatable. Both formats are open standards and open source. You can look at the specs and the code for either. The patents for .mp4 are known and need to be licensed if you are a large commercial operation. The patents for mkv are god-knows-what and may or may not get eaten alive the first time that the patents ever become important. No one knows. Pick your poison.
unraid sounds just like what I was *designing* for myself (doh!).
the idea of lots of disks always spinning is just moronic for home-users! we are NOT a data center! the game is different, here; and it has taken the industry a while to learn this.
I had a gazillion disks spinning in big-time home raid. for years. blech! lots of noise, heat, failure modes and like you said, you lose too much, you lose it all! the idea of being able to take a single spinner out, mount it on a 'dumb' system and read it, that's super powerful! don't discount that, folks! its worth its weight in gold.
my approach is to just be an idiot human (I do that part well) and save lots of copies of the files to lots of places. I do that anyway. then run a database job that will traverse your filesystem, get every file's size, date, md5 hash and any other tag info you want to peek inside, for. and run a smart differ on it. keep 'n' copies; report partial copies; trim the ones that are beyond what you need (if you want 3 copies, kill any 4,5,etc version you see). use ANY format you want for the disks, ntfs, ext3, jfs, whatever. each disk has a disk-id ('blkid' on linux shows this easily) and so each file has a disk-id to show where its located.
the final part of this is to keep all disks spun down and have the database know which disk the file is on (the one you want to watch/play) and have it do power-mgmt (as I call it) and spin the drive UP. either have it auto-spin down or spin down via mgmt when your 'session' is over.
spinning the disks is easy if they are all external esata/usb/fw. even simple x10 powerline relays can do this (my first proto will use this style of distrib tech). for internal drives, you power their molex's on/off via relays, via software control.
noise is stupid! power/heat wastage is stupid! raid is stupid for most of us. lets get beyond the gazillion spinners and be smarter about our large disk collections.
(oblig: I'm using arduinos and linux as the controller on all this)
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