Since many of you seem to be much deeper into the networking side of computers than I am, I thought I would ask you guys this. I need several TBs of redundant storage. I'll have an old PC I will build out to make the server. I have about 4TB of stuff right now. That number will grow. I would like to be able to stream that content via my plex server to plex clients I already have set up. I was thinking a RAID5 setup with a separate drive for the OS (probably a flavor of Linux) to run plex, torrents, etc. I have even thought about removing the router from my network and using it for DHCP and use the router as a wireless access point only. Ideas? I really don't want to spend a fortune on it. Right now all I would need to buy is some RAM, RAID card, hard drives and a power supply. This is one of those ideas that has bounced around in my head for years but never came to pass. I am thinking it is time.
I use freenas at home as my network storage. It runs from a usb key, leaving all of your disk space for storage. It has some built in upnp applications so you can stream video and music. I also have a separate old pc running vyatta add my firewall/router. There's a free version of that and it's great if you have the time to set it up correctly. Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk now Free
I really like plex and would like to keep using it. I don't have to move the server app to the storage server. It would be nice though. I am familiar with freenas though and that was one of my thoughts as well. I'll look into vyatta.
So quick background about my setup. Home has been fully networked. 3 MediaCenter Computers one in each room with a TV, used for OTA tv and serving my bluray library. 1 center server running windows home server 2011. 12gb of storage I ran through a number of options prior to settling on windows home server including freeness... which I really liked until I had issues. My biggest problem being that any power failure or crash resulted in a dead operating system, which led to any ufs or zfs drive being more or less toast. Nothing like losing 4tb worth of blurays. I went with WHS server because its just like windows, while it may be a bit of a resource hog. YOu know that it will work with the other windows computers, and when something in the system fails and the system crashes, the shit still works. Downside is it isnt free like freeness, but the lack of headaches is worth it to me.