I'm looking into making a Media Server where I could rip music to it, and then play it through iTunes over airport expresses, and control with an iPhone. I was thinking of building something just standard, no frills, all it has to do is serve media up, and anything can play music, but I'd also like it to have HDMI and Digital Optical out, so I could connect it upto my TV/Surround Sound. It all seemed fairly plain and simple, Celeron processor, fairly cheap Mobo, 2Gb of RAM (4 if budget can stretch) and 2 1Tb drives, nothing I'd make a thread about really, it's a boring work horse thats going to be shoved in the loft. Now, here's the problem, I was thinking of sticking a copy of XP Pro I have on it, but how do I set up a RAID 1? very few Mobo's seem to support it! So any help would be great, either pointing me out a board that has RAID as well as HDMI and Digi out, or a software solution? It seems XP can't do it :/ Cheers
question why use raid1? any specific reason your looking to use that. Maybe get a dedicated Raid controller if your motherboard cannot support raid one. also instead of using windows xp how about using XBMC its a really nice media program I have it on my orignal xbox and Im 99.9% certain you can use it for a server. Theres a few good articles on the XBMC website I think
I just found out XBMC does servering by accident, mrs was using the original xbox running xbmc and Win7 showed me a server, saw all programs running on it. Worth giving it a go on a PC for sure
if your motherboard doesnt support it, then your only option (on a hardware level) is a raid add-in card. of coarse you can run raid on a software level (i couldnt tell you how), but you would need at least a small 3rd drive to use as a boot drive.
If you are planning to buy the bits (i.e. they are not lying around) you might find it cheaper to buy a media NAS like a Synology DS211j, much lower power consumption and noise too. Will connect to a TV and act as a media server over network (but not HDMI obviously) : http://www.synology.com/enu/products/DS211j/index.php Theres a DIY build section on the forums for NAS on the SmallNetworkBuilders you might find informative : http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/ Cheers Chunks
XMBC when it needs to run iTunes.....? RAID 1 so in case of drive failure I don't have to rip all my music and DVD's. Dedicated RAID is way too expensive. Server is being stuck in the loft, avoiding the need to go for HTPC and quiet parts. The DS211j looks interesting, as it supports iTunes server, unsure how you would rip and add media to it, and whether it supports AirTunes and Apple TV2. The BitTorrent feature is interesting too... Wondering why there aren't more boards that support RAID though :/ Other idea is to build it as a Hackintosh, Run Plex (Better version of XBMC) and use Carbon Copy Cloner as an effective RAID 1 solution. Yes, I'm mainly a Mac guy, system in sig is purely games. EDIT - Argh thats a pain, iTunes Server merely acts as storage for iTunes, it cant stream to AirTunes and AppleTV, and the DS211j was looking so good!
I'm going to type this in all caps because it's important: RAID ISN'T BACKUP AND SHOULDN'T BE TREATED AS SUCH. MAKE TRUE BACKUPS DON'T TRUST RAID TO DO IT FOR YOU
Can you explain why not? I know it always needs the 2 drives, but if one dies just replace it and back up and running like normal no? Also, quickly spec'd this up, seems like it would do the job to me, gives me HDMI (Via the onboard DVI) Digital Optical, RAID, and fairly good ripping/encoding power (I know its nothing amazing, but I'm trying to do this cheap, and would rather wait longer that go for a quad)
http://serverfault.com/questions/2888/why-is-raid-not-a-backup Plus if there is a power surge, it's going to kill both disk instead of just one with the backup solution. That is unless you have the bad luck of backing up when there is a power surge but that's far less likely than with any RAID setup
i dont know about you, but my hardware is protected from surges by a surge protector. and anyways, most of todays motherboards allow for RAID 1 to be set up in an on-demand mode, which will only write to a slave drive when the user tells it to...thus eliminating all the problems in that list (except maybe physical damage to the box, if you leave the slave drive installed).
Just sayin' I wouldn't trust RAID for my files, family memories, irreplaceable dataz, but that's just me. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED Dun dun dunnnnnn.....
Not just at the wall socket, but from the PSU too. Get an problem MOSFET that goes up in smoke and it can cause all sorts of electrical damage. Also, get a Windows error while it's writing to the drives and your partition can get corrupted (I've had this before on a RAID 1).
if using on-demand RAID 1, neither of those is any more (or less) a risk as it would be with a regular backup system.
Ok, not using RAID1 as a backup? Which is the best method? All I want to backup mainly is music/photos/videos, not too worried about system files etc. Might put Windows 7 on it too
Cheers I'll give it a look now. Also, XBMC, is it me or is it horrible? Compared to Plex at least, the fonts and over all graphics are jagged, its slow and has horrible ways of displaying media. I don't like it at all.
