Please recommend NAS for use with HTPC

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rp1790

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#729227 9-Dec-2012 11:54

tukapa1: This is a timely thread as it is something I am currently looking at doing at home.

Storage would be for a combination of blu-ray, DVD and CD full uncompressed rips as well as HD downloads.

I was leaning towars the Synology DS212j due to all the good reviews but as always I started wondering whether 6TB would be enough and started looking 4 bay units. The Netgear RND4000 v2 looks like a good priced 4 bay unit and I was wondering whether anybody has had any hands on with this one (can be found here);

http://www.computerlounge.co.nz/components/componentview.asp?r=p&partid=16719

It's only $60 dearer than the DS212j but provides for much more future proofing as long as it's not a POS.

Any comments would be welcome.

I'll probably just have a WD TV Live media player in my main lounge attached to a full HD 50" plasma. In my 2nd lounge I have both Xbox 360 and PS3 attached to 42"plasma and also 100" projector. Everything is attached to a wired network so I'm thinking a NAS would be a great way to store all my media for easy access anywhere.

Any thoughts welcomed.

Thanks.

I have one of these. They are a very good NAS, however, they have a very very noisy fan, it bursts into life at random times and if you're having it in the living room the fan will need to be replaced with something like a Noctua NF-B9 Case Fan, 92mm ($45-$50). It's very loud...

I aslo think these may be limited to a max of 2TB drives and "may" not support anything larger. If thats correct you'll only get about 5.8TB storage.

tukapa1

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#729289 9-Dec-2012 14:34

Thanks for your reply.

It does say that the v2 supports 3TB hard drives so supports a max of 12TB, After formatting etc that would probably suffice for a while and I could add drives as I needed them rather than having to fully populate right from the beginning. The benefit is that it gives me growth room for the future.

The unit would live in the study so hopefully the noise wouldn't be an issue but it is good to know aftermarket fixes work.

Thanks again.

JimmyH

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#729412 9-Dec-2012 20:47

The unit I was looking at is the QNAP TS-412. It's essentially the same, with four bays, and reviews quite well. The hook for me was that, while it doesn't have USB 3.0 ports, it does have two eSATA ports that are compatible with port multipliers.

I thought that the QNAP unit might be a bit more future proof, as it means I can connect one or two relatively inexpensive 5-bay RAID drive enclosures to either back-up the NAS, or expand the storage of the array, should I wish to do so in future. 4x3TB drives give 9TB usable with a parity drive, which should be heaps for the forseeable future. But, if I get into high-definition video capture and/or ripping blu rays to serve my media players, it would be nice to know I have a fairly seamless expansion path to more than triple that space if I should need it.

The unit you are looking at has 3 USB 3.0 ports, but I can't readily find out whether they are compatible with multi-drive enclosures.

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