RE: NAS Recommendations

["Benfield, John \(GTI EMEA\)" <John_Benfield@xxxxxx>]

>I know a few of you are using similar system so can anyone
recommend a
>NAS box (either filled or an enclosure) to use with this system for
>streaming video. Criteria are transfer speed, noise and power
>consumption. The ability to hibernate when not in use would be nice, as

>would the ability to expand the box to larger drives at a later date.

I have an Infrant ReadyNAS. Expensive but appears to be good. Currently
they have a 2TB size limit, which is okay with 750GB drives (you do lose
a bit), however you do lose quite a bit of space if you use 1TB drives.
The next release of their O/S will remove this 2TB restriction. I
purchased a box with 2 drives (mirrored) and have now added two addition
drives. The system automatically converts the Raid1 to Raid5 and then
expansion into an additional disk. I found the whole thing very
painless.

I have mine connected up to a gigabit network hub and responds well, the
main bottleneck for really fast transfers appears to be Vista, XP run
quicker. The interface is web based and allows user groups, quotes and
AD integration - probably OTT for the home environment but it's there if
you need it.

The box supports various UPS's (via USB monitoring) and has both a
hibernate function and scheduled power up. Noise is okay but not
suitable for the living room. Power is okay - from memory the base unit
takes about 35w and each 750GB disk I have added takes an additional 20w
when spinning. The unit also supports drive spin downs after a specified
time, however it takes around 30 seconds to re-spin the drives before
they are ready as they are spun up sequentially.

I use my NAS for storing movies and mp3. Streaming movies to XBMC driven
at standard def just work - not tried at 720i/p as my XBOX doesn't
support it. At the mo I just store everything as the raw VOBS - I don't
do any additional compression other than removing extra's/menus.

JB
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