NAS advice please

[Knytestorme]

I'm looking to get a 4-bay NAS to setup as a media server to pretty much sit and stream content to my 360's and PS3 around the house as an energy saving measure so my main comp can be off most of the time rather than on 24/7.

Essentially I want to stay under $400AU and am looking at the following 2 devices:

* Patriot Javelin S4 for $329
* QNAP TS-412 for $355

These seem to fit my needs so am wondering which of the two most people would choose, or why I should stay away from one or the other. I'm also concerned about how they handle transcoding and connection to the consoles since I currently use windows media center to stream from the pc rather then dnla.

 

[LurchFrinky]

While technically these could probably handle transcoding, you will be seriously better off with a build-your-own system.

You need:
A motherboard with GigE and 4 SATA ports (SATA 2 and 3 are not necessary for HDDs), but most entry level boards will suffice. You don't need any of those fancy overclocking options or extra USB 3.0 ports or anything else that adds to the price.
A modern processor. Sandy Bridge, Llano, etc. all sip power when idling, which is what your NAS will be doing most of the time. Sure an Atom or Brazos will consume less power, but they will be stressed for transcoding work and will affect disk transfer speeds for some file systems. There is a big jump to an i3 (not specifically recommended, just an example) in processing power, but the idle power draw is still surprisingly low. I believe a Pentium G530 is a popular suggestion.
And a power supply, memory and a case. Nothing fancy of course.

I don't know what prices are like or where you can buy the components, but in the US this might cost $200-250. You can run FreeNAS for free, but there are other options as well.

 

[Face2Face]

I have a dedicated media server with an Athlon X2 5000+, and it barley handles Full 1080P rips. I use Plex, and stream to my Roku 2. I would get something a little more beefy. I plan on upgrading to a Athlon II X4 620e soon.

 

[k3vb0t]

Like Lurch said, sounds like you might be better off with building your own (or upgrading one of your current systems and using your old system for NAS). Also look at NAS4Free instead of FreeNAS -- it is essentially the project fork from FreeNAS 7, has a lot of plugins that FreeNAS 8 doesn't currently have.

 

[poofyhairguy]

You need cores for transcoding. An old quad core will beat anything dual core for the money.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

You need cores for transcoding. An old quad core will beat anything dual core for the money.

Not true. Especially for transcoding (Quick-Sync), the 2xxx and 3xxx i3s will beat a Q6600 pretty handily.

(In fairness, I posted that almost word for word not too long ago, but some benchmarks enlightened me.)

 

[beginner99]

Not true. Especially for transcoding (Quick-Sync), the 2xxx and 3xxx i3s will beat a Q6600 pretty handily.

(In fairness, I posted that almost word for word not too long ago, but some benchmarks enlightened me.)

Yeah but is there a media server /dnla Software that has this feature? AFAIK no and hence you will need a beefy cpu. However i would just store it in the format that you will later play it in...

 

[Knytestorme]

Thanks for the replies people, makes things a little more complicated.

I'm trying to reduce my power usage and those two NAS's seemed to fit the bill or running a bt client as well as streaming mp4, avi, divx. Thinking more about it it occurs to me that both my tv and blu-ray player are dnla devices as well so it's quite possible that no transcoding will be needed to be done to stream to them like it may have been for the 360/ps3.

I think at this stage I'll get the QNAP and test it out, if it doesn't handle it as well as I need then I'll just use it as an actual NAS for my source repository and data I am working with for my actual job and look at building a low-watt usage htpc but I really can't see one that I can build that would run at < 30w at load.

 

[RaiderJ]

I'm all for building your own NAS. Much better bang for the buck. Check out the link in my sig for a ZFS based NAS. The processor handles a Plex server just fine (running it on a Ubuntu VM). A quad-core would be better for transcoding video though.

I also put together a Sandy Bridge HTPC that runs on a mini-ITX board. Not sure if it runs <30W on load, but it would be close.

 

[boomhower]

I had a QNAP an it sucked. Long list of reason I'm not getting into it. If you want a prebuilt I'd go with a Synology.

 

[Mark R]

I like my QNAP, it's pretty stable and generally easy to use.

Slow though. My God, it's slow.