These posts concerning my media server build do not really fit in any of my other blogs, and since it is something now used by everyone in the house, I thought this blog would be the best place for it.
A number of years ago I set up a dedicated NAS unit using a QNAP Quad Giga NAS unit.
I installed 4 x 1TB Hitachi Deskstar disks and had it setup as a Raid 5 disk set.
This setup was OK, but nothing earth shattering, the 1GB network port would barely achieve 1MB/s throughput and the NFS/SAMBA shares were almost too slow to use.
It did serve a purpose as a dedicated file store for all my movies, tv shows, photos and music, and I further backed up my personal data from it to a pair of 400GB 2.5″ SATA drives that I swapped every so often and then stored at my mother’s place in Gloucestershire as an off-site backup.
I also used an Xtremer Sidewinder as a media player, initially mounting via NFS from the NAS unit, and later with a locally attached USB Sata drive.
This was all fine until the disks started failing.
When the first disk failed and was replaced, the unit lost all of its configuration and I had to recover the raid sets manually, which took me a few days and much internet searching.
The next time two disks failed in quick succession and I effectively lost all of the contents of the NAS unit.
Fortunately, because of my off-site backups, I did not lose too much with regards personal files and photos, however all of the tv series and movie files were lost forever, the music I also had backed up elsewhere, so no losses here either.
I survived without a NAS for a number of years after this and also replaced the Xtremer with the media player part of my VU+ Ultimo satellite receiver, again using a locally attached USB SATA drive for content.
Then after building my cinema room, I once again became interested in building a NAS come Media server and went looking for some suitable hardware to build it on.