Should I Get A Nas?

[orangecat]

I have one PC in my house with a SSD and a 200GB HDD. Soon I will have a second PC in my house and I want some kind of storage solution where i can store all of my music not on either of the PC's but a server of some sort. I want to be able to play music from this storage solution on my Andriod phone and iOS phone as well as both of my PC's. Currently I have no clue if a NAS is designed for this because I have never owned one. I was thinking of running a server similar to what Linus has but not as big or as fast because i'm sort of on a budget. I have a Intel Celeron G530 sitting on its box and i thought if I built a server I could use that because i won't need a ton of performance only 1-4 users will be connected at a given time and I plan on only using it to store pictures, music and videos. I do have plans to upgrade it in the future to a low power xeon or something but i thought for now it will do. I also want it to be redundant  I don't want my data to be lost because of a drive failure but I don't want my server/NAS to be slow and pointless. Does anyone have any information on what i should do.

 

PS: I have no plans on upgrading to Windows 8 so I'm sticking with Windows 7 until microsoft pulls their heads out of their asses. So will there be any compatibility issues if i do upgrade to Windows 8?

[ryan9298b2]

Use seagate's new: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178332

 

and you can use it for media, archiving, music, and anything else your heart desires!

 

Linus video: 

[thedave5000]

you could always just set up the folders on your pc as shared folders and then set a network location in my computer, if you decide to go for a NAS make sure that you set up at least two drives in any raid apart from 0, they are constantly on and have a lot more chance of failure. that said the chance is still kind of low

[Zims]

If yo want to reuse an old pc than go with FreeNAS

I have done it and it works.

Because you want redundancy better go with a ZFS filesystem on freenas.

But ZFS requires more ram. Keep that in mind.

In your shoes I would go with a NAS. Seem exactly what you need.

[MG2R]

I'd advise you to think about what you want. Do you want a very simple solution which is almost plug and play but not very upgradeable/flexible? Or do you want a more flexible solution which has a bit of a learning curve but is able to offer you a lot more upgradeability and customizability?

 

If you're looking for the first option, then go for something like a Drobo or a Synology NAS. Those are quite easy to set up and use and should offer everything you need.

 

If you're looking for the second, then I'd advise you to buy an el cheapo motherboard with enough SATA connectors, which fits your Pentium processor. Don't bother buying a Xeon processor, that isn't necessary at all. Put Linux on the server and use mdadm to create a RAID 0 or RAID 5 array. I advise WDC Red or WDC Green drives.

 

If you want an example of such a thing, you can take a look at my K'nex server and it's accompanying software tutorial, which should give you enough info to get Debian (Linux) up and running with RAID and Windows shares. Keep in mind that my server is a bit overkill. What you need  to get started is

• CPU
• motherboard
• PSU
• RAM
• two hard drives

If you're taking the second route: my server runs quite a lot of extra things (web server etc.) and doesn't even use 100MB of RAM. So just buy the cheapest stick you can find.

 

If you have any more questions, feel free to ask :)