cushy91

Hardware DEVICE: HP Proliant MicroServer N40L (off the shelf solution) CPU: AMD Turion II Neo 1.5GHz RAM: 2GB DDR3 1333 ECC CONTROLLER CARD: Onboard 4-port SATA RAID controller (uses SFF-8087 connector to an internal backplane) PARITY DISK: Seagate 1TB ST31000528AS HDD 1: 1x 500GB Western Digital WD5000AAKS HDD 2: 1x 500GB Seagate ST3500820AS ADD-IN CARD: TBS 6981 Twin Tuner DVB-S2 Satellite TV Receiver Software and Configuration: The box is running unRAID 5.0-rc11. Single parity disk protecting 2x array disks. It's a basic box but does what I need it to. Usage: This box serves a few different functions. It is where all the PCs in the house backup to using CrashPlan, it holds all of the backups of install files for several different apps that I have, Clonezilla images of a few of the PCs in the house, it holds the archive of my old iTunes library (now in Google Music) before I moved to Spotify. Lastly it DVRs and serves up satellite TV to whomever connects to it via XBMC. Kept powered on 24/7. Uptime is currently sitting at 14 days after a dust clean out. Backup: CrashPlan+ Additional info: This box is the baby of the 2 I have. Its name is David to go along with Goliath, my larger 18TB media server. POWER CONSUMPTION: Boot - 85W All disks spun up - 56W All disks spun down - 50W Avg - 64W 1 disk spun up, 1GB network file transfer - 54W Photos Lockable Compact little unit with all of the drive screws as well as tool stored in the door. Motherboard is removable too, using the 2x blue thumbscrews, for installing components. Included coldswap drive sleds Internal USB port that I use to boot the server. The 2x coaxial inputs on the PCI-E satellite card

As looney said there, they are Cooler Master 4-in-3 cages. They're quite inexpensive but you forgo hotswap abilities. For that you really need to invest quite a bit more cash, more than I wanted to anyway. I'm not sure if unRAID even supports hotswap and how often do you really need to swap out drives? They do the job nicely :) The case came with 2 basic cages with removable drive sleds (rather flimsy) like this http://www.hardwareheaven.com/reviewimages/xclio_nighthawk/13.jpg

Hardware CASE: XClio Nighthawk PSU: Cooler Master GX 550W MB: Asus M4A78LT-M CPU: AMD Sempron 140 2.7GHz (Unlocked to a Athlon II X2 440 :)) HS: Stock AMD heatsink RAM: 2GB DDR3 1333 CONTROLLER CARD: Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 SAS Card PARITY DISK: Seagate 3TB ST3000DM001 HDD 1: 2x 2TB Western Digital WD20EARS HDD 2: 1x 2TB Western Digital WD20EARX HDD 3: 1x 2TB Seagate ST2000DL001 HDD 4: 2x 1.5TB Samsung HD154UI HDD 5: 2x 1.5TB Western Digital WD15EADS HDD6 : 1x 1TB Samsung HD103UI CACHE: 1x 160GB Western Digital WD1600AAJS Software and Configuration: The box is running unRAID 5.0-beta14. Single parity disk protecting 9x array disks. Currently looking to downsize by replacing smaller disks with 3TB now that prices are starting to come down, just replaced the parity with a 3TB last weekend. Will need to wait until there are fewer moths in my wallet to continue though! Usage: Like most with these large arrays (if mine could be called that looking at Rudde's and Whaler's) I use it to hold all our movies and TV shows. It serves as the central point for these as well as being the central XBMC MySQL database for all the players/PCs in the house. Backup: No backup. Danger is my middle name :lol: Additional info: The box's name is Goliath to go along with David, my smaller 1TB CrashPlan and general PC backups server. POWER CONSUMPTION: Boot - 142W All disks spun up - 135W All disks spun down - 83W Avg - 120W 1 disk spun up, 1080p MKV - 89W Photos Before a cable tidy After some cable tidying this morning (quite tricky to do anything with those SFF-8087 cables)

Just had a read of the forum thread at the bottom of the page on Amazon and apparently the guy on there got confirmation that it is indeed a mistake http://www.amazon.co.uk/this-mistake-genuine/forum/Fx1FI44OM7TM9HE/Tx3S2RHRMOGQ7IX/1/ref=cm_cd_dp_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&asin=B00C1ZHT24

At this price I doubt anyone will get a 7950 but Amazon are pretty good with returns :)​

Looks like a 650Ti Boost to me Wonder would they honour the sale?

Hey guys I have a Macbook Air which I am currently using for commuting to and from university for work including web development and programming as well as some light VM work. I am looking into building myself a proper desktop PC that will be capable of running this kind of stuff a bit better as I am due to graduate in July. As well as running a few games. I have a budget of around £700 GBP and I need everything really (CPU, GPU, PSU, case, cooler, SSD/HDD, monitor, speakers, keyboard, mouse) I already have 8GB of Crucial Ballistix 1600MHz RAM but might get another kit for my VM work if necessary. I also already have access to the OS through MSDN (great being a student!) Here is my list of parts that I thought of: http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/TkAE The graphics card I have in there isn't quite the model I had been looking at on Amazon. I had been looking at the Sapphire 11200-14-20G OC card which is currently £147 and the monitor I had been looking at was the Acer S240HLbid just because it was big and cheap at around £120 (the LG in the list is just a placeholder) If you have any suggestions please let me know. I am open to Intel or AMD, I don't mind which really but the budget can't too far beyond £700 GBP. PS: If it's any help, £700 GBP is around $1100 USD Cheers :)

The single core Sempron 140 in my build cost me £25 GBP / $40 USD which was super cheap and it performs perfectly well, especially in something that mostly only needs to serve files/calculate parity data. As a side note I recently got an iPad Mini and started playing around with Plex and transcoding and the CPU seemed to struggle with higher bitrate/resolution stuff so I had a look online and found out that my motherboard could unlock the 2nd core on the CPU which was locked as part of the binning process so I got a dual core CPU for basically no money! I had concerns over stability but it's been running fine for weeks now :)

That's gotta be a 40TB rig right there, no? Straight to the top of the chart looney :P

Check out SlySoft AnyDVD HD: http://www.slysoft.com/en/anydvdhd.html and LifeHacker's guide here: http://lifehacker.com/5559007/the-hassle+free-guide-to-ripping-your-blu+ray-collection This is what I use and it circumvents the copy protection on the disc (not strictly legal, but you do have the disc and it's better than downloading the movie illegally) as well as some other nice features. Using this software alone will allow you to create a bit-for-bit copy of the Bluray or DVD disc as an ISO image, so for Bluray it will be rather large (+/- 30GB) You can then mount this ISO image as if it were a real disc in something like the free SlySoft Virtual CloneDrive. If you don't want to rip the full Bluray to ISO you can use MakeMKV which will put the movie only (no menus/extras/extra audio tracks if you don't want) into a .mkv container. This will bring the size down a little but it will still be quite big but a bit more manageable. This also takes care of getting around the encryption and copy protection. If you want to go an extra step further you can use something like Handbrake to re-encode the movie still at 1080P but at a lower bitrate to decrease filesize even further but still retain a level of quality and detail that the HD format provides. This will also allow you to pick and choose which audio tracks to passthrough (not convert) to the end result. Handbrake will also rip straight from standard DVDs (movie only) to .mp4/.mkv if you also have VLC installed (I believe HB uses VLC to get around the DVD's encryption)

This forum post over on XBMC may prove helpful: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=116724 It would seem that 3D Blurays aren't supported because of the format they are in and as such an external player needs to be called from within XBMC when you want to play one. Calling an external player would also solve the problem of limited menu support too.

Been using greens on the trot for 2 years now. No issues whatsoever. With unRAID I run a preclear script before adding them to the production array. This script reads and writes zeros to the entire drive and I tend to run it a few times on each drive just to be sure it's a good one. Generally speaking if a drive doesn't die soon after you get it, it should run for a long time. I also think it's good practice not to buy a lot of drives at the same time and from the same supplier as this only multiplies your chances of getting a dud drive. My system may be a different use case from yours. I don't write to mine all that often and the drives spin down when not in use so this could be why I haven't had any issues. I will say though that if I need to put any extra storage in at any point in the future I'll probably go with WD Reds next time. For now I have about 1TB free which should keep my going for a while as well as a good spring clean deleting session of old crap that's no longer watched/used.

I have 2x Raspberry Pi running XBMC using Raspbmc at the minute. The main RPi has replaced my main HTPC which has now been repurposed. It's not quite ther yet, though, in terms of stability and every feature working but it's pretty damn close. I have mine playing live TV and 1080p movies served up from from my network storage box with no problems (for movies at least, there's still a few issues with live TV) I'm not entirely sure if it's possible to run Netflix yet on XBMC by way of an add-on but I do remember work being done on one. If you like tinkering and want a project then by all means get a Pi. If you want something that's gonna work straight out of the box or something that has WAF/SAF (Wife/Spouse Acceptance Factor), then look elsewhere...Apple TV, Roku, WDTV, Xbox 360 other STBs etc

+1 for CrashPlan

Work pipe: Home pipe: Still doesn't make me want to stay in work any longer than I need to :)

Blurays are big!

Description added :)

Here's my home NAS (Goliath) for serving up movies and TV. [TABLE=class: text_table_text_table_text_table_text_table_text_table] [TR] [TD] Component[/TD] [TD] Value[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD] Case[/TD] [TD] XClio Nighthawk (got it cheap)[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD] CPU[/TD] [TD] AMD Sempron 140 2.7GHz (unlocked 2nd core so it's now an Athlon II X2 4400e)[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD] RAM[/TD] [TD] 4GB (2x4GB) Corsair DDR3 1333MHz[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD] Motherboard[/TD] [TD] Asus M4A78LT-M[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD] Operating system[/TD] [TD] unRAID 5.0 RC4[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD] Controller[/TD] [TD] Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD] Hard drive (parity)[/TD] [TD] 1 X WD 2TB Green (WD20EARS)[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD] Hard drive (data)[/TD] [TD] 3 X WD 2TB Green (WD20EARS/EARX) 1 X Seagate 2TB 7200RPM (ST2000DL001) 2 X WD 1.5TB Green (WD15EADS) 2 X Samsung 1.5TB Green (HD154UI) 1 X Samsung 1TB Green (HD103UI)[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD] Hard drive (cache)[/TD] [TD] 1 X WD 160GB 7200RPM (WD1600AAJS)[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD] Boot drive[/TD] [TD] 1 X 2GB Kingston DataTraveler USB stick[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD] RAID array configuration[/TD] [TD] unRAID - single parity disk protects array[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD] Storage array capacity[/TD] [TD] 15TB[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD] Network[/TD] [TD] 1 X GbE[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD] UPS[/TD] [TD] APC Back-UPS ES8 700VA[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD] File system[/TD] [TD] ReiserFS[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD] Idle power usage[/TD] [TD] ~100W[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE] I also have another unRAID box (David) that I use for local PC backups based on a HP N40L MicroServer. I have recently stuck ESXi onto it and virtualised my unRAID setup and using it for VMs to further my knowledge on Windows Server and Active Directory as well as OS deployment. It's only 1TB is capacity (minus another 1TB for parity) and 128GB Samsung 840 SSD for ESXi datastore so won't make the leaderboard here. You can look at both David and Goliath on my little website here if you want: http://thegearsphere.com (not plugging or anything I swear :P)