Good value NAS+personal cloud+media-center+torrent-machine solution?

[Aimless]

Hi!

I'd like some tips and recommendations for a cheap/good value NAS + personal cloud + media-center + torrent-machine solution for all our photos, music and porn TV-shows and movies there are usually two windows 8 PCs and two android tablets on the network. I'd be especially happy if it could be managed easily and painlessly through windows, and if file-management could be managed easily and quickly via windows explorer. The personal cloud (Ã* la dropbox) application is probably the least important function, followed in order of increasing importance by torrenting, streaming video and storage+backup.



Ideas so far that are, in Sweden, similar wrt cost in terms of $$$:

Samsung NC10 netbook + external drives

Pros:
By far the cheapest (just have to buy hard drives)
Puts it to use (now it's just lying around)
Flexible and versatile
Looks pretty good!

Cons:
Does not handle HD video streaming well wg. with XBMC
Takes up more space than the next alternative



RaspberryPi + external drives

Pros:
Very inexpensive
Most flexible
Very quiet and energy-efficient
Supposedly handles HD video streaming very well
Active and enthusiastic community

Cons:
More of a hassle to set up
Poor I/O performance a problem for file-transfer and torrenting?



Lacie CloudBox, WD My Cloud

Pros:
Simplest, quickest set-up
Attractive design
Fairly good reviews

Cons:
Least flexible
Some disconcerting reviews about annoying noises
Uncertainty about HD streaming performance




Any and all tips and cool ideas very welcome

[Illusions]

I'd like some tips and recommendations for a cheap/good value NAS + personal cloud + media-center + torrent-machine solution for all our photos, music and porn TV-shows and movies there are usually two windows 8 PCs and two android tablets on the network. I'd be especially happy if it could be managed easily and painlessly through windows, and if file-management could be managed easily and quickly via windows explorer. The personal cloud (Ã* la dropbox) application is probably the least important function, followed in order of increasing importance by torrenting, streaming video and storage+backup.

I'm going to tell you right away that if you want a machine that will be able to function as a NAS, personal cloud server, media center, and torrent machine, that also has a lot of storage space for photos, music, and videos, that will handle multiple machines on the network at once, and is also easily and painlessly managed through windows, that the Raspberry Pi probably isn't your best bet. The Model B comes with two USB ports and an ethernet port, with a caveat. The ethernet port is really an on board USB to ethernet adapter. Its also USB 2. So your transfer rates are pretty much limited by that. Accessing it from Windows for configuration is going to require either SSH-ing into it, or installing a VNC server on it (or why not both?). Setup will not be "easy", at least not "easy" in the way most modern computers are easy to setup.

[Flixy]

What he said.

I use a raspberry as media center myself with a WD MyBookLive for storage. That way transfer to/from the NAS doesn't go through the raspberry. While not an official feature, you can install a torrent client (transmission) on the NAS , it's pretty easy. Only downside is that it is uninstalled when you update your firmware, you have to reinstall the client. You can set it to auto load torrent files from a watch folder, and use a web interface, so you can use it from any device on your network. WD has its own cloud service, the android app seems fine when I tried it. You can map the drive through a website on any pc, as well, but when you copy a file in Windows that way, your explorer window will freeze until the file has transferred, and you can't see progress bar, which is annoying, but it works. I noticed they released a Windows app as well but I haven't tried that one yet, so I don't know if that's any better.

It also hosts a dlna server (twonky), that works with my phone, so presumably a smart tv can use that as well to play media. Keep in mind that most tv's have problems with a lot of codecs, subtitles, etc., so using a dedicated media center might be a better idea. I'm happy with my raspberry as media center, it's very easy to set up, the scraping makes your media collection a lot nicer, worked out of the box with my remote, the android app is decent, lots of useful plugins (I use a spotify, internet radio, subtitle fetcher, and public tv on demand plugin). spotify plug-in is rather shitty, but there's a new one I haven't tried yet that's supposedly easy to control through a web interface from your phone/laptop, and there's no Netflix plug-in. And you can play nes/snes/megadrive/etc games on it, too tough that does require some work (and SSH). For just a media center, it's extremely simple to set up though, you can download an image, put it on an SD card, and it works. I recommend openelec. Anyway, in my setup you avoid transferring files to it, which you listed as its downside. Streaming movies up to 1080p works. Oh, and it supports airplay, and from android devices you can use a lot of apps to play stuff to it as well (local, network files, but also streamed video like YouTube).

[Aimless]

Thanks for the info, the one about the shared USB 2.0 is esp. useful. I'm not averse to a great deal of hassle during set-up at least, it'd be fun as long as it ends up working. Nor am I against making a few compromises, eg. wrt the torrentbox aspect and the personal cloud. The dual-purpose NAS backup and HTPC setup is what I'm most keen on and I think it might be nice to have more than one HDD in it.

Perhaps a better albeit more expensive mini-computer: http://hardkernel.com/main/products/...=G138503207322

(USB 3.0, separate from ethernet, faster and more powerful in general)

[Illusions]

Perhaps a better albeit more expensive mini-computer: http://hardkernel.com/main/products/...=G138503207322

For just 10 USD more you can have a single bay Synology NAS, or for 60 USD a dual bay Synology NAS. And you'd still have to provide the HDDs. Although that does look really interesting if you're really going for a complete DIY solution.

[Khendraja'aro]

I'll second the Synology NAS. I've got the DS413j (with 4 disks in a RAID 6 array, mind) and it's quite nice.

It'll work as a media center (through PlexServer though you'll be best served to deliver HD content in a format which can be read by your TV / clients as the CPU in this NAS is not powerful enough for transcoding HD content on the fly!), it has a multitude of backup solutions, has torrent clients and generally everything you need.

And if you need more - the whole thing is Linux based so you can roll your own if need be.

If you're doing NAS keep in mind that you should pay a little bit more for the proper kind of hard discs. Something like the WD Red line should suffice.

Not to mention that the Raspberry Pi as a NAS suffers greatly in one aspect: Network speed. It only has a 100 Mbit NIC - sound fast until you were forced to copy several Gigabytes of data. My NAS has a Gigabit NIC.

[Illusions]

It only has a 100 Mbit NIC - sound fast until you were forced to copy several Gigabytes of data. My NAS has a Gigabit NIC.

It also has to share transfer speed with any other USB devices connected, so if he's trying to stream content from a connected hard-drive across a connected ethernet cable, its going to be quite slow.

[Khendraja'aro]

Not that USB hard drives are speed monsters to begin with

But if he really wants a small solution: Cubietruck. That's an alternative to the Raspberry, which sports WLAN, Gbit-NIC, SATA and three USB 2.0 connectors. There's also a GPU capable of hardware-based video en- and decoding (HDMI connector included).

[Aimless]

For just 10 USD more you can have a single bay Synology NAS, or for 60 USD a dual bay Synology NAS. And you'd still have to provide the HDDs. Although that does look really interesting if you're really going for a complete DIY solution.

Unfortunately the cheapest NAS from Synology I can get in Sweden is at least $50 more expensive. At that price point (and certainly if we're talking about the real NAS-units from Synology) I start thinking worrying thoughts like, "How much do I really love my porn?" and also become interested in more comprehensive units.

For example:

http://www.dustinhome.se/product/501...m_content=5472 (EEEBOX 1035 CEL 1.1 2GB/320)

http://www.dustinhome.se/product/501...t-barebone-wr/ (NUC I3 3217U 1.8GHZ HDMI/THUNDERBOLT, would require ethernet adapter)

http://www.dustinhome.se/product/501...i-lan-barbone/ (NUC CELERON 847 1.1GHZ, gigabit ethernet but only USB 2, no Quick Sync)

The NUCs are small and attractive and I was considering using them with a bootable USB drive or just installing a cheap mSATA SSD. One of them has Intel's Quick Sync technology for transcoding on-the-fly, although I'm not sure how well that works in Linux atm.




The ODROID-XU is esp. interesting because it has a pretty good GPU (PowerVR SGX544MP3) and comes with USB 3 (so it can be used with a gigabit ethernet adapter but may be too difficult to use that with a USB 3 hub?), but the Cubietruck looks like another good contender in that category

With all that being said, I should perhaps confess that my router is only 10/100 so no gigabit goodness there anyway

[Aimless]

I got a reasonable deal on a linkstation 421DE and a 2TB WD Red extremely smooth setup. Only irritating thing right now is I'm not sure I can get the linkstation's torrent app to work with my VPN-service

[Flixy]

Well, I am by now a bit less positive by my Western Digital NAS. The program they have to access your NAS from other places is utter shit, very slow, not intuitive, and apparently it's too hard to fix a proper certificate which means that even working with their official program, you'll get security prompts you have to ignore to be able to access your drive. Alternatively you can mount the drive using the wd2go.com website, unfortunately that uses a Java app, which is also not properly done. As in, when you try to load it you get three security prompts, you have to manually add their domains to an exception list for everything to even work. And then when it's mounted it uses some stupid protocol for data transfer that makes your explorer windows freeze, don't show progress, and are slow and prone to crashing. And that's their official two ways to access your data, which is something they advertise with WD my cloud my ass.