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It's the NAS (Network Attached Storage) Thread, yo.

Might be a silly question but how does Windows interface with a NAS? Will it just be in "This PC"? I've always wanted to do this but never got around to it.
 
Fahrenheit said:
Might be a silly question but how does Windows interface with a NAS? Will it just be in "This PC"? I've always wanted to do this but never got around to it.
Click to expand...
A NAS has to be discoverable via some network protocol. But yeah, generally, under "This PC" under the network node if network discovery is enabled, it should show up there along with any shares configured on the NAS.
 
Crazy this thread popped up. I plan to build a home nas/htpc/light gaming pc this upcoming week. I will post the build once I have everything setup.
 
Rur0ni said:
A NAS has to be discoverable via some network protocol. But yeah, generally, under "This PC" under the network node if network discovery is enabled, it should show up there along with any shares configured on the NAS.
Click to expand...

Might sound silly and a basic question but how compatible are network drives for things that want files? Like when they have file explorers built into it.
 
Fahrenheit said:
Might sound silly and a basic question but how compatible are network drives for things that want files? Like when they have file explorers built into it.
Click to expand...

Most NAS boxes have windows (and mac) compatible file sharing functionality. This means that you create folders, store data in those folders, share them out, permission them accordingly and your client maps it as it would a normal network device. It is incredibly straight forward.
 
DXPett1 said:
Wow, that's a cheap, excellent build. I wonder how much smaller you could get that build
Click to expand...

Thanks.

The Prodigy wasnt actually my first choice for my NAS although i do love the case. I actually wanted to buy a Lian Li PC-Q25 which has 5 Hot-Swap Drive Bays plus you can mount 3 more drives to the bottom. The Prodigy was just about half price when I was putting my build together.

http://www.lian-li.com/en/dt_portfolio/pc-q25/

PC-Q25-01.png

PC-Q25-05.png

PC-Q25-06.png
 
I think it's time I consolidate my media storage/archival before I foolishly just throw expensive 4 TB drives into my next gaming PC.
Looking at some Synology units, and the EX 4. I've settled on that if I'm going to do this it's not gonna be a self built freenas unit.
 
I just got my ReadyNAS 516 today. Filled it with 6 WD RED 4tb drives. It is SO much better than the rn104. The 104 is going to be the backup drive for the 516. Currently moving all my Plex content to it. It takes up the full gig bandwidth!
 
AlexMogil said:
I just got my ReadyNAS 516 today. Filled it with 6 WD RED 4tb drives. It is SO much better than the rn104. The 104 is going to be the backup drive for the 516. Currently moving all my Plex content to it. It takes up the full gig bandwidth!
Click to expand...

I've been meaning to ask. If you store all of your Plex content on a server, what processor are you all using? Do you have a separate computer as your Plex client, which does the transcoding, or does your NAS do it all? One of my main hang ups right now. I need to figure out the Plex stuff before I jump in.
 
darkazcura said:
I've been meaning to ask. If you store all of your Plex content on a server, what processor are you all using? Do you have a separate computer as your Plex client, which does the transcoding, or does your NAS do it all? One of my main hang ups right now. I need to figure out the Plex stuff before I jump in.
Click to expand...


Depends on the NAS. The RN104 has an Atom processor and can only direct play with no transcoding, and it does a poor job at that really. The 516 has a Core i3 dual proc and can handle transcoding just fine. Plex says that the device has to have an x86/64 processor to transcode so that eliminates a lot of NAS devices. Additionally at the cost of the 516 (or any x86 based NAS) it might just be easier to build a Windows or Linux NAS.

Now, you could always attach the low powered NAS to a PC via NFS or iSCSI and then let the PC do the transcoding but then the NAS is a stack of disks.

Let's add something else: XBMC. XBMC does all the transcoding work at the CLIENT and the NAS just serves the media on shares that the XBMC client attaches to. That's always an option but I have found it is a little difficult to get set up *well.* And if you do it once you gotta do it again on your other streaming devices. That's why I like Plex - if I set my media up correctly, any Plex client then will see a consistent media library. Time saver. I liked it so much I went PlexPass. They deserve my money for what they have given me.
 
Layd Dly said:
Just found this thread. I built my NAS last year and figured it post it here. I do need to update my drives though to something larger now that prices are coming back down again.

The goal of my build, was to be affordable, low-power, and quiet. My Hardware Specs are Below:

* MoBo: ASUS C60M1-I
* CPU: Integrated AMD Fusion APU C-60 \ (1.0GHz, dual core)
* RAM: Kingston Technology HyperX Blu 8GB (2x4GB) 1333MHz DDR3 CL9
* Case: Bitfenix Prodigy - Arctic White
* Power Supply: Antec EarthWatts EA-380D Green 380 Watt 80 PLUS BRONZE
* HD: x4 Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB in Raid-Z
* OS: FreeNAS 8.3.1 (Running off Sandisk4gb Jump Drive)

That motherboard is built for a home NAS since it has 6 Native SATA 6Gb/s ports. Not Counting the Drives I already owned, the whole package cost me **$196.27**

VTGqp6z.jpg

E5dfft2.jpg

tX9laRN.jpg
Click to expand...

Sadly this mobo is no longer available. Anyone have a comparable mobo?
 
dIEHARD said:
holy balls that thing is $1100
Click to expand...

Without hard drives.

Woof.

But I got a deal on it, I'm happy with it, and I can hack the hell out of it when I get bored. It feels like a decent NAS will always be esspensive.

Building one is much more economical and the apps are not as limited.
 
Speaking of plex I have decided to start a dedicated plex server.... I ruled out most nas's for the reason stated above most nas's dont have the horsepower to transcode in real time and I wanted a single nas box to do both.

I currently have a hp microserver n40L and was a really great machine but just doesn't have the horsepower to transcode plex. I was going to get the gen8 microserver but according to the cpu bench it would only be able to one 1080p transcode w/o a cpu upgrade and I wanted something a bit more future proofed.

Settled on the Lenovo TS-140. Was on sale recently for $249 which is a very good price and even the low end i3 has enough horsepower to easily do 2 concurrent 1080p decodes.

The issue with this setup is going to be drive storage.... actually going to test out external usb 3 enclosures since plex doesn't need a ton of speed. I use drive bender for storage pooling/replication so I can use external drives just as well as internal as long as they can keep up.

FYI for anybody else looking.... you need 1700-1900 on the CPU mark per 1080p decode and you can get CPU stats here. http://cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php
 
I could sit and surf on this stuff all day long. Some PC enthusiasts look for FPS, I look for storage efficiency and data availability. I'm not interested in watching the content any more, I just want to create the platform.

Of course I'm doing this when "owning" content is on the way out.
 
AlexMogil said:
Without hard drives.

Woof.

But I got a deal on it, I'm happy with it, and I can hack the hell out of it when I get bored. It feels like a decent NAS will always be esspensive.
Click to expand...

Yup, but well worth it. My first NV+ lasted about 5 or years. Got fried in a power outtage, and netgear replaced it. Still going strong after about two years on the new one.
 
Hey guys.

I'm looking for a basic NAS that can host video files for me to stream over the network to my XBMC box. The Synology DS214SE looks like it will suit my needs and the price is appealing. I know this makes some sacrifices in hardware over the more expensive models in the range to attain that price, but I think it will do all I need.

I don't require it to do any transcoding or anything – just host a few TB of Blu-ray rips (up to 40GB each) and serve them up to XBMC, which will do the decoding. I'm new to this so can someone assure me that it'll be up to the task?
 
AlexMogil said:
Depends on the NAS. The RN104 has an Atom processor and can only direct play with no transcoding, and it does a poor job at that really. The 516 has a Core i3 dual proc and can handle transcoding just fine. Plex says that the device has to have an x86/64 processor to transcode so that eliminates a lot of NAS devices. Additionally at the cost of the 516 (or any x86 based NAS) it might just be easier to build a Windows or Linux NAS.

Now, you could always attach the low powered NAS to a PC via NFS or iSCSI and then let the PC do the transcoding but then the NAS is a stack of disks.

Let's add something else: XBMC. XBMC does all the transcoding work at the CLIENT and the NAS just serves the media on shares that the XBMC client attaches to. That's always an option but I have found it is a little difficult to get set up *well.* And if you do it once you gotta do it again on your other streaming devices. That's why I like Plex - if I set my media up correctly, any Plex client then will see a consistent media library. Time saver. I liked it so much I went PlexPass. They deserve my money for what they have given me.
Click to expand...
The RN104 doesn't have an Atom it has a single core Marvell Armada 370 1.2GHz CPU.
 
Just filled up my DS2413 with 4x4tb red :)

Was waiting for the 5tb's and ready to overhaul my current 8x3tb red, but they didn't come...

Guess I'll overhaul them next year :) For now enough storage to continue my hording ;)
 
NekoFever said:
Hey guys.

I'm looking for a basic NAS that can host video files for me to stream over the network to my XBMC box. The Synology DS214SE looks like it will suit my needs and the price is appealing. I know this makes some sacrifices in hardware over the more expensive models in the range to attain that price, but I think it will do all I need.

I don't require it to do any transcoding or anything – just host a few TB of Blu-ray rips (up to 40GB each) and serve them up to XBMC, which will do the decoding. I'm new to this so can someone assure me that it'll be up to the task?
Click to expand...

Since the processing for XBMC is offloaded to the computer playing the files, I think that should be fine. That device looks like it has 100 Mb throughput and the reviews I read show that those numbers are true.
 
AlexMogil said:
Since the processing for XBMC is offloaded to the computer playing the files, I think that should be fine. That device looks like it has 100 Mb throughput and the reviews I read show that those numbers are true.
Click to expand...

Thanks, yeah, it works brilliantly for this. I want something bigger at some point so in a year I'll look at a DS414j or equivalent model for more flexibility in terms of what it can do.
 
So as mentioned below I'm going to upgrade my freenas, using my old gaming rig which is in a antec case, which in all honesty is entirely too large. I popped it open and I find the motherboard has 8 SATA slots instead of the 6 I thought it had.

Also ordered a SAS/SATA card that is supported by FreeBSD/FreeNAS, which adds an additional 8 SATA slots.

Going to have 4 120gb SSDs in a RAID 5 for my hyper-V lab cluster storage. And the rest can go with 3tb drives, which would be 36tb raw storage for my ripped blu-rays. That should hold me over for a while, considering 315 blu-rays is about 10tb.
 
This is such a specialized problem that I can't seem to find any help, but maybe someone here has some experience and can help me. Here goes.

I am running the 3rd party Transmission app on my Synology that you can download through SynoCommunity as I have been having problems with Download Station crashing fairly frequently while a torrent download was in progress. I got it setup fine and have been using remote-gui instead of the web interface to connect to the daemon on my Synology. In remote-gui there is an option to setup path mapping so that you can browse your file system to select a folder to put your download in when you add a torrent file. I have been able to get it working properly on Windows, but can't get it running right on OS X. Is there anyone out there that knows how to setup this up properly? I can't seem to find anything online to help me out. Any guidance that you might have is appreciated.
 
Got the Shakes said:
This is such a specialized problem that I can't seem to find any help, but maybe someone here has some experience and can help me. Here goes.

I am running the 3rd party Transmission app on my Synology that you can download through SynoCommunity as I have been having problems with Download Station crashing fairly frequently while a torrent download was in progress. I got it setup fine and have been using remote-gui instead of the web interface to connect to the daemon on my Synology. In remote-gui there is an option to setup path mapping so that you can browse your file system to select a folder to put your download in when you add a torrent file. I have been able to get it working properly on Windows, but can't get it running right on OS X. Is there anyone out there that knows how to setup this up properly? I can't seem to find anything online to help me out. Any guidance that you might have is appreciated.
Click to expand...
Since no one else has responded I'll give my two cents and maybe someone else will see the thread.

Can you do it through mapped drive through SMB or Apple file share or whatever it's called?

When I had my make I used SMB to hit my NAS.
 
captive said:
Since no one else has responded I'll give my two cents and maybe someone else will see the thread.

Can you do it through mapped drive through SMB or Apple file share or whatever it's called?

When I had my make I used SMB to hit my NAS.
Click to expand...

I can tell you how I tried to do it. I mounted the share where I wanted to point Transmission to. I then went into remote-gui and tried to point it to that share in the path mapping section, but it just kept telling me that it couldn't find the path. It was fairly simple to get working on Windows, but OS X has me stumped.
 
Anyone interested in buying an empty HP Mediasmart EX495? I'm looking to switch to something smaller and simpler. Seeling it "empty" because I think the system drive is corrupt. See my post below for more details:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=99917993&postcount=371

I haven't really had the time since I posted this to recover data off the drives or buy a new system drive to try to do a restore. I would love to just sell the hardware as-is, but if it's a dealbreaker I can find some time to get it up and running again before unloading it.
 
I really want to setup a NAS soon, but I can't decide whether I want to build it myself and figure out FreeNAS or just get a simple 2-bay Synology to start with (or splurge for one of the 4-bay ones maybe? Ahh! Tough to make decision.)
 
Looks like the DS415play has officially been announced. I'm a little disappointed it's the same hardware as the DS412play given the high price, and the fact transcoding is less than stellar on it. I wonder if I even need the transcoding ability now that all my DLNA devices play MKV natively.

Does Plex rely solely on transcoding? I don't even think the play devices allow transcoding with Plex.
 
Valkyr Junkie said:
Looks like the DS415play has officially been announced. I'm a little disappointed it's the same hardware as the DS412play given the high price, and the fact transcoding is less than stellar on it. I wonder if I even need the transcoding ability now that all my DLNA devices play MKV natively.

Does Plex rely solely on transcoding? I don't even think the play devices allow transcoding with Plex.
Click to expand...
Yes.

XBMC if you have the hardware to play MKV natively. Plex if you want to stream to iPad/iPhones mobile devices etc.
 
Been looking into trying a NAS. For people running the FreeNAS of an USB drive, I heard in case it breaks people run some sort of cron job to backup some system files, but they back it up on the storage part itself. I was wondering if the USB breaks how do people then recover those with the new USB? Do they just leave it on some public part of the storage that a new USB drive can access?
 
MrJames said:
FYI, WD has launched the 5TB and 6TB Red (and Green) drives for $250 and $300. Rated for up to 8 NAS bay setups. They also launched the Red Pro for 8-16 bay setups but I'm not sure what the difference between those and their Re enterprise drives are.

http://anandtech.com/show/8263/6-tb-nas-drives-wd-red-seagate-ec-hgst-he/2

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=810

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LO3KR96/?tag=neogaf0e-20
Click to expand...

fantastic, i hope this pushes the 3tb drives down just a little.
 
Synology owners should be aware that a Cryptolocker variant known as Synolocker is in the wild now.

http://www.cso.com.au/article/551527/synolocker_demands_0_6_bitcoin_decrypt_synology_nas_devices/

Synology network attached storage (NAS) devices, capable of storing terabytes of data, have been targeted by ransomware that encrypts victims’ files.

Owners of Synology's NAS devices might want to unplug their storage boxes now to avoid being affected by ransomware that uses strong encryption to lock files on the brand’s machines and demands US$350 for the decryption key.

The new attack on Synology kit comes within a year of Synology NAS devices being struck by fraudulent Bitcoin mining operators, with several owners on Sunday reporting that they had found a message from the “SynoLocker Automated Decryption Service” — when accessing the main page of the Web-server for their NAS device — stating that “all important files on this NAS have been encrypted using strong cryptography”.
Click to expand...



From the Synology forums:

http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=88716

My Diskstation got hacked last night. When I open the main page on the webserver i get a message that SynoLocker has started encrypting my files and that I have to go to a specific address on Tor network to get the files unlocked. It will cost 0.6 BitCoins. It encrypts file by files. Therefore I started to copy my most important files to another disk while encryption was in progress on other files. After the most important files was copied I turned of my disk.

I have also tried to use the hard reset button on the disk as described in your dosuments. I wanted to just reinstall the OS. But the Diskstation did not respond properly to the button.

Hope you soon find a solution so I can save the rest of the files.
Click to expand...

It's not immediately clear what the source of the infection is, or what versions of DSM are affected. For the time being I've closed all incoming connections to the box.
 
Pretty frightening. Synology definitely needs to refocus their priorities on security since this would be the second or third major issue in the past year.
 
I just remotely shutdown my 213j. I hope there is something figured out soon as I store all of my Plex content on there and would like to be able to watch it.
 
got hit here on my DS1813+. i was wondering why my music wasn't playing last night. i was too lazy to check at the time.

luckily, i have all my data backed up to CrashPlan.

i'll just turn it off for a few days and then re-install the OS before restoring files from CrashPlan. hopefully there are official details/instructions from Synology by then.

RangersFan said:
Well shit I just shutdown my DS1513+ to be safe. Is shutting it down good enough or do I need to unplug it?
Click to expand...
shutting it down is fine if you haven't already been infected. did you access it remotely first?
 
More and more I'm beginning to think that I should go with a FreeNAS build after I retire my Synology. That Synolocker thing is scary stuff.
 
PensOwl said:
More and more I'm beginning to think that I should go with a FreeNAS build after I retire my Synology. That Synolocker thing is scary stuff.
Click to expand...
this is all fine and I've been a proponent of FreeNAS in this thread, Windows server 2012 is also a good option, though not free.

But the question is, why are you going to sketchy sites and downloading sketchy stuff? The crypto lockers can't just scan the internet and say Ohh here's a synologyNAS device lets infect it.
 
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