Good day, community,
For some time now, I have been interested in the idea of making a home media server to store movies and stuff for personal use.
It all started from buying a simple external 3.5" usb hub, which I added as an UPnP through the router, making it possible to watch from every device in the house without any hassle (and keeping the drive away at a distance, being less bothered by the noise).
Now I’m thinking of the 3rd (actually 2nd, since I simply put the 1st one on the shelf since I can’t really plug it anywhere) hdd. And this brings me to the question of something bigger than a chinese usb hub, which I have hidden from my eyes.
Overall this will be a “much text; didn’t read” thing, but I hope to hear some ideas and suggestions. Thank you in advance.
#First question is the "fundament#
My first idea was to go for Synology. But that one operates only in RAID/similar. I really don’t worry much about one of the drives failing at some point since this it’s not that hard to recover. So I want to go for pure volume and not fail safe storage.
I do know that there is RAID0 (or what was it called) where data chunks will not be written to several drives. But that one has one downside - when you add a drive to Synology, the first thing it does is FORMAT. I do not wish to experience the future problems this may uncover.
Second idea is to go for a regular dedicated PC.
This does sound better, and I’m planning to upgrade my current pc, so I’m assuming that I would only need a case (have an eye on for one specific Thermaltake, which I forgot the naming of… and where did I bookmark it).
But I’m open to the question of keeping that PC always on in terms of power consumption. To this day, I have never worked with the sleep/hibernation question and how well can it perform. Currently thinking it to be Win10 and not Linux, since I cannot find a decent replacement for Daum/Pot player (and VLC doesn’t cut it when it comes to small details, done in that player(s)).
Third option was to go Raspberry/similar. But that will still require to power the drives, which may end up in a headache of its own.
#Drives themselves#
In one hand there are Seagate Barracudas and similar, which have never failed me and I don’t really hear them working (except a few times). They are good, but I do see that after 4TB I can only find 5400 ones. I’m quite used to 7200, but I did notice that VLC can have “starvation points”(visible artifacts) when playing/resuming a 50+ Gb file. I would imagine that 5400 will make this problem occur more.
But this also may be the usb hub’s/router’s fault (although the router is a 300sh usd Asus model from last year or something).
So I’m more thinking about 7200 ones.
And this is where the IronWolf and similar NAS/Server drives come into the spotlight. I haven’t yet researched much about their lifespan and stuff, but I did come across one simple truth - they are meant for server uses, where noise levels aren’t a problem. Yes, since this would become a separate PC, this would not be much of a problem, but I would want to have that PC near the TV, since I plan to HDMI it to it and use stand-alone as an option.
P.S. For those that find my hassle a bit “strange” to say the least…
I do understand that this may raise a question of why not use netflix and stuff, but in my case the answer has a few points:
- I live outside of US (I would even say EU), so buying subscription for 4K is a “bit more expensive” in terms of income (and if it’s even possible to be fair) for every media service, which may have “only one series that I actually like to watch now and then”.
1.1. Even so, it will most likely not have a decent dub (I do speak english without problems, but sometimes you just want to watch something without overthinking/turning on subtitles).
1.2. Some old shows (at some point I tried finding “Angry Beavers”) can become disabled or scattered across several media owners (I do like watching one season on one service and then start looking for the next one on all other services) - Player and pre/post-process. I came across multiple cases, where VLC would give a much richer sound experience in comparison to DaumPlayer (not even speaking about “web players” with their "we don’t bother to normalize sound… which isn’t a case if the audio goes through a sounds card and not by SPDIF to speakers with no pre-process).