Ah that’s what you where talking about, I though of that but it’s two cumbersome for the non tech savvy people I would be giving this to…
True but thats the point of the post, how feasible would it be to do this way down the road, like years, the idea is to have them as gifts and give the ability to the people that I would be giving them to to have a plex server, always on PC backup, maybe a low end vanilla MC server, so on…
I have my own NAS (currently 8TB over 3 drives raid 5) and from my perspective I would either want to go 4 plus drive bays, or super bare bones 1-2 drive bays, but my fear is that if I go for a full 4 bay solution that it will all be to waste as they won’t understand how to add a drive, but I also would like it so if they do want like redundancy it “can” be added (though I suspect unlikely)
6 drive unraid license is $60, though i am aiming for $175-$200, but that’s including EVERYTHING, the board, PSU, case if applicable, drive, SD card if applicable but I would gladly spend the extra $60 for the unraid if I can get everything else for the $175-$200
Video transcoding is not recommended at all on ARMv7 and ARMv8 devices. For the best experience, always aim for Direct Play support on all of your devices.
I think that if you need more power than a SBC can provide, it’s time to start looking at midrange used consumer gear. (stuff like an i5-6500 is super cheap to find used, and opportunities like this pop up on our B/S/T section every month or so)
Nothing lasts forever, and when it comes to computers, especially so.
You could probably do a dell optiplex refresh for that price range. Way more powerful than a SBC, more ram as well.
You might want to go the optiplex route, now that I think about it.
Here:
8GB of ram for $75. You might need to custom up the hard drive cages, I forget what they have in em, but they’re solid. They’re 3rd gen i5’s, so you’ve got some serious HP as well.
Not from what I’ve heard, the odroid HC1/2 is apparently a beast of a little thing and people have said this it handles 1-2 1080p transcodes fine (tested h.264) also the HC1/2 apparently also has the GPU hardware in there and is full 1080p h.264 and h.265 transcode capable
I was looking into that but I think size and power use is a concern, for one of the people I’m planning to give one to would have no problem with this but the others… it kinda needs to be a “I can hide it behind I’m router and landline phone” kinda deal, that why I’m aiming for the HC1/2, I can get them 5TB in a reasonable small space
Once again not really trying to get ideas for NAS options so much (though welcome) more if someone wants to down the road to add redundancy or more space if I can just “drop” another one on them and hey presto done… but I think that’s been the problem, there does not seam to be an easy way to do this…
You’ll be looking at a difference of around 35w. While that’s a large percentage, it’s a cost difference of $75 a year, assuming it’s at 100% cpu, 24/7. (assuming $0.25/kwh)
That’s not a huge amount of money.
Space is a different concern. Not much you can do about that, tbh.
I think you’ll find that most people are okay with something that size if it serves a good function.
Sorry, I just keep thinking that a solution would be easier by rethinking the base system, rather than rethinking the SAN. I really don’t think a SBC SAN would work out that well.
Not feasable in my opinion. I wouldn’t wish a distributed filesystem on anyone, especially if they’re not tech savy.
If you’re afraid of that you should get them a ready to go NAS. Those things are reliable and very very easy to use. If you set it up so that adding drives is easy as slotting a new one in they won’t have any issue understanding that.
It’s doable, but what kind of drives will go in if you’re factoring 200$ max? Maybe you can afford a couple 1TB blues new from Amazon, but nothing more I think.
OP, you can find a ZyXEL 2 drive bay on ebay, which supports RAID1 for around $25, like the ZyXEL NSA221 (or similar). I never used one personally and it isn’t geeky, but it is user friendly and doesn’t look like a fire-started kit. It can be configured through the web interface only and supports some form of SMB (probably Samba) and syncing devices like USB drives and stuff.
If you want user friendliness, you pretty much have to use one of those solutions. And you also want it on the cheap, which makes it even harder. Unless you want to buy an old SFF PC with 2 or 4 Sata ports and install something like CentOS / Ubuntu on it and run Samba, which would probably be the easiest and cheapest idea, going with a commercial solution on the used market is most likely the 2nd best choice. You could get a Banana Pi M2U (it has 1 sata port) and an external drive ebay, but by that point, you’re better off buying a used Rasbperry Pi and a used 2 bay USB HDD dock and install Samba on the Pi and mount the 2 drives in software RAID1. But really, by that point, it is getting pretty dicey and pricey.