NAS + HTPC Combo?

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

I've been running a NAS for several years now. It's an OpenIndiana system with napp-it. I really just set it up back in grad school and never worried about how to maintain it or even upgrade it. It's been in set-it-and-forget it mode.

I had cable and plenty of entertainment to keep me occupied at my old place, but since moving in with the gf, we decided to divorce cable, and while Chromecast is great, I'm thinking an HTPC would help work well here because some things like Amazon Prime Video are just difficult with Chromecast. Also my parents still have Comcast, so I can easily log in and stream whatever TV I want to watch... but once again that's all easier to watch if I just had a computer hooked up to the TV.

Just bouncing some ideas off of here as you guys are probably better experts than I am, but how realistic would it be to convert my NAS to a Windows system and run FreeNAS on VirtualBox? This leaves me a Windows system that I can hook up to the TV and play whatever files I want and also allow people to watch Youtube videos or whatever the heck they want. It's also much easier for downloading media and stuff.

Would this result in a huge performance penalty for the NAS? Is this even a good idea? As long as I can still sit in the bedroom with my laptop and watch whatever I want through wireless (that's more of a factor of Wireless performance), then I'm OK.

I would post this in the HTPC forum, but I'm more concerned about the NAS aspect of things. HTPCs can work from pretty much any hardware lying around, but NASes seem trickier to setup and configure.

For the record, the hardware I have is:

• Core i5-2400
• Z77 Extreme4-M (mATX)
• 16gb DDR3
• 1x WD 1TB Blue
• 6x Samsung F4 2TB
• IBM 1015 SATA Controller

 

[smakme7757]

Is there any reason why you cannot just install Windows 10 (Or Windows server if you have a copy) and just use shared folders? Storage Spaces despite it's bad rap is very fast if you run in a mirrored array (2/4/6/8 disks ect.). Parity isn't all that good though, but it's also not the recommended RAID level anymore.

Freenas is one of the platforms which really wants to run on bare metal. It doesn't want to run in a VM. It's a fantastic choice for a dedicated storage appliance.

And keep in mind that you don't need a dedicated OS to run a "NAS". NAS is just a term for a dedicated network file server "appliance". There is nothing wrong with settings up a HTPC on windows and giving it a lot of disk then just share out the space with shared folders.

Note:
The new "In thing" is currently UNRaid - https://lime-technology.com/ which has got a lot of praise recently. You might want to have a look at it.

I can also add in that i just use a Windows box as our home file server (Windows Server 2012 R2 which gives me Quotas and a few nice extras). Personally I'm a fan of having storage as it's own box that does just one thing - storage.

 

[frowertr]

Why not an Apple TV or Roku or Fire TV? Would be much easier to leave your NAS as is if its working properly.

Another option is to virtualize the host and run a VM for your nas and another VM for Windows or whatever you want to use as a HTPC client.

 

[PingSpike]

You actually have all the hardware required to PCI device passthrough. That IBM controller is usually flashed to IT mode and passed through in ESXi or KVM from my readings. The i5 2400 (nonK) supports VT-d. Asrock boards usually do well with it.

You could definitely do the windows with virtualbox. Then maybe raw device map in the drives underneath it to the freeNAS VM, or you could create virtual disks on the drives and use those. I wouldn't do it myself that way, but I can't think of any reason it wouldn't work. freeNAS is supposedly not supported in a VM whenever I read about it, but more reading indicates lots of people do it that way anyway. My personal reason for not doing it this way is I feel windows is by far the messier OS to deal with and I want that to be in the VM, not running the show. You don't need special hardware for this route, but you already have the most important bits to do it other ways so that isn't really an advantage in your case.

You could use unraid which supports KVM VMs with passthrough. I think you'd just need to find a single video card and USB device to passthrough to the HTPC VM. This is a common setup for people from reading the forums. It takes some messing around to get it to work sometimes, but unraid is the most simplified VGA passthrough solution out there. But none of them are exactly plug and play.

Or you could use a different hypervisor and either pass the card along with drives right through to freeNAS or a different piece of NAS software while also passing through a video card for your HTPC so neither of them is the master.

 

[Anteaus]

I wouldn't overcomplicate it. Windows 10 + File Sharing + Plex. You can setup Plex to update regularly as you add files to your media library. Assuming you have HDMI out, your system would be perfect for local playback as well as handling multiple concurrent streams.

 

[smitbret]

I second the opinion that FreeNAS on a VM will probably leave you wanting something else. I like the Windows+Storage Spaces. Personally, I like Windows+FlexRAID or Windows+SnapRAID.

If windows isn't a necessity then unRAID is really good.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

You actually have all the hardware required to PCI device passthrough. That IBM controller is usually flashed to IT mode and passed through in ESXi or KVM from my readings. The i5 2400 (nonK) supports VT-d. Asrock boards usually do well with it.

You could definitely do the windows with virtualbox. Then maybe raw device map in the drives underneath it to the freeNAS VM, or you could create virtual disks on the drives and use those. I wouldn't do it myself that way, but I can't think of any reason it wouldn't work. freeNAS is supposedly not supported in a VM whenever I read about it, but more reading indicates lots of people do it that way anyway. My personal reason for not doing it this way is I feel windows is by far the messier OS to deal with and I want that to be in the VM, not running the show. You don't need special hardware for this route, but you already have the most important bits to do it other ways so that isn't really an advantage in your case.

You could use unraid which supports KVM VMs with passthrough. I think you'd just need to find a single video card and USB device to passthrough to the HTPC VM. This is a common setup for people from reading the forums. It takes some messing around to get it to work sometimes, but unraid is the most simplified VGA passthrough solution out there. But none of them are exactly plug and play.

Or you could use a different hypervisor and either pass the card along with drives right through to freeNAS or a different piece of NAS software while also passing through a video card for your HTPC so neither of them is the master.

Yeah I've heard the passthrough part is the PITA. Integrated doesn't work, and it seems NVidia cards fail, so I need to get a cheap Radeon. With that I don't see how I can even get good idle power drain.

This is just for outputting 1080p videos and opening webpages/streams, so the cheapest/lowest power consuming Radeon would be ideal. Not trying to play Crysis here

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Is there any reason why you cannot just install Windows 10 (Or Windows server if you have a copy) and just use shared folders? Storage Spaces despite it's bad rap is very fast if you run in a mirrored array (2/4/6/8 disks ect.). Parity isn't all that good though, but it's also not the recommended RAID level anymore.

Freenas is one of the platforms which really wants to run on bare metal. It doesn't want to run in a VM. It's a fantastic choice for a dedicated storage appliance.

And keep in mind that you don't need a dedicated OS to run a "NAS". NAS is just a term for a dedicated network file server "appliance". There is nothing wrong with settings up a HTPC on windows and giving it a lot of disk then just share out the space with shared folders.

Note:
The new "In thing" is currently UNRaid - https://lime-technology.com/ which has got a lot of praise recently. You might want to have a look at it.

I can also add in that i just use a Windows box as our home file server (Windows Server 2012 R2 which gives me Quotas and a few nice extras). Personally I'm a fan of having storage as it's own box that does just one thing - storage.

I went ZFS back in 2011 or whenever because of some guides I read and I guess there was a trend to go that direction. No need for hardware RAID and I can still get the benefits of RAID5 or 6 with redundancy by running raidz2.

Do you think its worth reconfiguring the whole setup to go to Windows? If I would like to preserve the ZFS setup, but I just want something easier to deal with outputting to a TV. Windows seems to be the easiest because it means I can play anything from a browser too (I'm thinking Amazon Prime Video, etc) and even Comcast Xfinity online streams.

 

[grimpr]

I run Windows 10 with Stablebit Drivepool on it and everything else, Plex,Torrents, on virtual machines on Windows 10's Hyper-V, works great. Just use a big 240GB ssd and 16gb of ram and you're set, running mine on an Haswell Celeron which supports VT-d, although i dont use it.

 

[PingSpike]

Yeah I've heard the passthrough part is the PITA. Integrated doesn't work, and it seems NVidia cards fail, so I need to get a cheap Radeon. With that I don't see how I can even get good idle power drain.

This is just for outputting 1080p videos and opening webpages/streams, so the cheapest/lowest power consuming Radeon would be ideal. Not trying to play Crysis here

Nvidia cards (outside of the quadro line or grid cards) don't work because nvidia drivers detect they are in a virtual machine and then disable themselves. KVM based solutions have provisions to lie to the drivers though to get them running. ESXi doesn't really have anything like that though, its not really designed with GPU passthrough in mind.

I'd just buy a $15 HD 5450 off ebay in your shoes. Pretty sure those things are only a few watts idle. They have terrible gaming performance though.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Nvidia cards (outside of the quadro line or grid cards) don't work because nvidia drivers detect they are in a virtual machine and then disable themselves. KVM based solutions have provisions to lie to the drivers though to get them running. ESXi doesn't really have anything like that though, its not really designed with GPU passthrough in mind.

I'd just buy a $15 HD 5450 off ebay in your shoes. Pretty sure those things are only a few watts idle. They have terrible gaming performance though.

So you think that can passthrough just fine? The 5450 is pretty old, but is there any reason to look at newer low end cards? I believe the R5 230 or something is the new low end per my quick Googling.

Also what about sound passthrough? Do I need a dedicated sound card too?