Post your server/storage/media center

My homebuilt unRAID server. Intel Ivy Bridge i3 components. Super quiet, low energy usage. 5.44TB capacity. Plenty of room for expansion.

I use it for file storage.

As it stands now;

Promise Pegasus R4 ( full and about to be upgraded to 8TB when funds allow)

Seagate 4TB 7200 SATA III which backs up the R4...also full!

Here is my storage for the house.

TheCus n5200xxx (On the left)

• Hard Disks: 5x2TB = 10TB. (7TB after formatting)
• Raid 5
• Network cards configured for load balancing
• Holds my iTunes Library / Applications

ReadyNAS NV+ (On the right)

• Hard Disks: 4x1TB = 4TB.(3TB after formatting)
• Raid5
• Is used only for Time Machine

I use a Synology 413j and a few other drives for storage. I also have a 2010 Mac Mini for serving up media in a variety of ways ( direct connections, PLEX, iTunes, Airfoil, etc..). I also use DS Audio app on the Synology quite a bit for music.

Here is my recent HTPC build. Dedicated to running XBMC.

The parts

Picture of the completed build

The HTPC case setup on my HT rack.

Uofmtiger said:

I use a Synology 413j and a few other drives for storage. I also have a 2010 Mac Mini for serving up media in a variety of ways ( direct connections, PLEX, iTunes, Airfoil, etc..). I also use DS Audio app on the Synology quite a bit for music.

Click to expand...

How do you get any work done with the comfy looking chair. I would pass out in seconds!

puckhead193 said:

How do you get any work done with the comfy looking chair. I would pass out in seconds!

Click to expand...

I guess the answer is that I don't do very much "work" in the space.. I wasn't even in the market for a chair when I bought it, but it was a match made in heaven for those times I want to recline and listen to music.

I was not able to find a good thread on here for this so thought I was start one... I am looking into starting to build a home server setup at my house. I have also been looking at Network Attached Storage (NAS set-ups). I would love to see everyone's home network setups as well as anyone with enclosures with 4 or more drivers.

So i was thinking of starting with something like this for all my storage.. Synology DS415+ (4 bay enclosure) - https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS415+

As well, I am not sure if i want to buy a small 3 feet tall rack enclose or build something into the basement.

The mini server is in the TV room. I have TB and FW cables routed through the wall to a closet where a couple TB enclosures, a StarTech dock, and left over FW and USB drives sit in a bookcase (USB drives connected to the left over dock). The yellow ethernet cable goes off to a Silicon Dust HomeRun OTA receiver. I'm running Myth on the server, host TimeMachine backups for 5 users, host a webserver, do some file sharing, A CCC backup destination for another 3 users, a Nova backup destination for a couple windose machines, and the iTunes media server for the house appleTVs.

Much easier to set up and Much Much better performance than the typical NAS, including the Synology I abandoned in place. Will blow the DS415+ out of the performance and scalability water for about the same money.

Photo is a little old, I've since replaced the monitor with a larger Dell one and ditched Ubuntu for Windows 10. Using Windows Storage Spaces to create 2 storage pools, each is 15TB, one serves as the main archive and the other as a backup. 2x 3TB WD Red drives and 6x 4TB. The hot swap drive modules are from iStarUSA, they're connected to a Highpoint Rocket "non-raid" PCIe controller which supports 8 drives using 2x SAS-4xSATA breakout cables. The drives above those are from top-down: DVD/Hot Swap for SSD/Blu-ray. I use the optical drives for backing up music & movies.

Here's my Synology NAS DS213 that I got almost 3 years back and not a glitch so far. Runs flawlessly 24/7.

It's not very exciting to look at, and is just a big black box sat underneath my desk. Picture with the side off, which is slightly more interesting:



Supermicro board with a Xeon 3.4GHz and now with 32GB RAM and 8x4TB drives. Running FreeNAS 9.3 and used as a cloud server (ownCloud), media server (Plex), DNS (unbound) & VPN (openVPN) servers, along with a number of VM running various flavours of Linux, FreeBSD and even Windows. One of the best IT investments I ever made

I run a 2012 Mac mini Quad core I7 with two 1 TB disc drives. All of my media is on a 4bay Synology NAS running Raid five. I use Crashplan to back up data externally. I run the Synology Cloud software for music, photos and office files. This allows me to keep these files Sync on my NAS, laptop and server. Movies and TV shows are only kept on NAS and external backup.

Time machine backup are done to the NAS.

Currently run '12 Mac Mini i7 that used to be the workhorse but all of my media, storage and backup needs but last Christmas I got a Synology 1515+ and it has slowly been taking over everything. The Mac Mini almost just sits on the shelf and probably just needs to be sold off soon. The main reason I kept it around after the Synology was to watch my movies on AppleTV, now that the new aTV's have Plex and Plex Server runs on the 1515+ there's no reason to keep the mini than just wanting to keep it.

It currently has 16GB and a Samsung 840Pro 256GB+Samsung 1TB HDD fusioned.