Media centre pc or NAS

[Roscore100]

Hi, my buffalo nas just died and I managed to lose a lot of music so been looking at options for backup and serving media round the house. Currently i am leaning towards a Synology DS212. But given costs I could nearly stretch to a dedicated media pc with blue ray copier for backups. Has anyone else looked at same set up?

In terms of current use, I stream tv and music through ps3 so some limitations on hd playback which makes media pc seem like a good idea. I stream stuff to other rooms and use centralised storage for access to music etc with iTunes through laptops. Also interested in remote access to media/ files and nzb downloads. And any possible ipad app integration so the wife can control it too... Plus make sure everything is backed up well! Cost is a consideration as is power and noise. Router is by tv in main room whatever it is needs to be there.

Any suggestions or advice on this much appreciated? Thanks in advance. Ross

 

[ukjeyaraj]

IMO, you need to have both.

 

[mygarbage2000]

Hi, my buffalo nas just died and I managed to lose a lot of music so been looking at options for backup and serving media round the house. Currently i am leaning towards a Synology DS212. But given costs I could nearly stretch to a dedicated media pc with blue ray copier for backups. Has anyone else looked at same set up?

In terms of current use, I stream tv and music through ps3 so some limitations on hd playback which makes media pc seem like a good idea. I stream stuff to other rooms and use centralised storage for access to music etc with iTunes through laptops. Also interested in remote access to media/ files and nzb downloads. And any possible ipad app integration so the wife can control it too... Plus make sure everything is backed up well! Cost is a consideration as is power and noise. Router is by tv in main room whatever it is needs to be there.

Any suggestions or advice on this much appreciated? Thanks in advance. Ross

You need an HP N36L Microserver. For 15k, nothing can beat it as a NAS/HTPC combo.

 

[vaibhavyagnik]

You need an HP N36L Microserver. For 15k, nothing can beat it as a NAS/HTPC combo.

Links Please

 

[dazoy]

I have a synology 410 and use it for

1. Timemachine backup server for the macs in the house
2. Backup server for PC's in the house
3. itunes server
4. Media server for movies to stream from
5. File server
6. Torrents/nbz download server
7. Photo storage and album server
8. Music playback server from computer browser and iphone
9. FTP server
10. My own cloud hosted on the server for files etc...
11. Built in anti virus
12. Mail server
13. PnP server for media players in the house
14. squeezebox server for squeezebox player in the kitchen.
15. Some other linux apps for development and trial purposes
16 http server

Its always available over the Internet through ddns service - which is free.

It has 4 disks 2 TB each and I have raid 5 for redundancy.

On top of all that I have excellent support from synology when 2 of the disks failed on the same day. They logged in and recovered the partition. I could back everything up to an external disk and rebuild the server and use the backup to restore data from.

I am not sure if there is anything I could ask for from a NAS. I wonder if we really do need computers now. May be the world is moving to tablets for front end and server for all the back-end activities.

anyway, back to the question, I would rather have the synology than any other server, or htpc. for my needs, it works perfectly.

You would need a player to play the flies - htpc. Synology is meant for a different purpose - to host the media. Let the player do the job of playing it, which can change over time. I use it with boxee box, wdlive, ipad and iphone and pc's and macs to play media on.

Hope this helps and feel free to ask any questions.

Cheers,

Saurabh

 

[Shivam]

I'm using Netgear ReadyNAS. The music clients are controlled by iPad app called Kinsky by Linn and a Musical Fidelity controller app.

 

[mygarbage2000]

Links Please

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13716_na/13716_na.HTML

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=104372

HP Microserver N36L as HTPC - Overclockers Australia Forums


This model is available in India from all HP resellers. The quote I got was for 15.5k with a 160G HDD and 1GB of ECC RAM.

However, there is an updated version called the N40L of which I am the proud owner. (I have a friend in UK who carried it for me)

It is a dual core full featured box with HDD bays and an ODD bay. In a very small form factor. People run WHS, FreeNAS and XBMC on it. The forum links will tell you.

PM me if you want more info.