Re: Giving up on WHS- looking for a FAST/BIG network media storage solution

[Steve Morgan <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm having fun with WHS at the moment, moving to another machine after
one of my USB drives (and I haven't found which, yet), started causing
my existing machine to power off due to a 'thermal event'!

I've found lots of interesting information in the logs that WHS keeps in:

c:\documents and settings\all users\application data\microsoft\windows
home server\logs

The files starting DEUtil are the DE Migrator logs and are worth a look
if things are going awry. I found them particularly helpful in
discovering that DE Migrator goes much slower if not all of your disks
are online!

Cheers,
Steve

On 27/05/2010 14:25, keyvan2r wrote:
> Hi all
>
> Last year I decided to build a windows home server box to house my
collection of movies&  blu-rays - 5.5Tb(2x 2tb hitachi, 1x 1.5TB WD,
550Mb WD System drive. I have around 450 DVD's and 100 BD's.
> > From the start I had performance issues with WHS box. It is a
high spec machine with quality components. The streaming of movies is very
slow, I almost always get stopping, stutter and skipping with BD and often
with DVD. I also always have to rip to a local disk and copy the folder
over to server. The copy process is also often really slow and invloves a
number of time-out errors (retry button).
> I tried rebuilding the machine, bought an adaptec 4 port pci-e
controller. Turned off all file duplication. I have read about issues re DE
Migrator, but I can not see why it is soooo slow!
> I am now at a point where I need to look at an alternative solution.
> unRaid from Lime tech seems to be the best one so far. It has
"user shares" which can span multiple drives thus giving the
"big disk" feature which I get from WHS - plus it offers a single
disk failure protection. I use MyMovies/WMC for my client pc's for media
managment / playback - their version for WHS was another driver to choose
WHS. I keep DVD's in Video_ts folders and BD's as ISO. I have dabbled with
Cinemar's DVDLobby and Plex. Might look at DVDLobby again now that 3.9 with
on-screen display (as in Kaleidescape)- I prefer that method of browsing
titles to the touch screen...
> Obviously I have to build this in addition to the existing WHS in
order to copy the data (all 4.8 tb!). This is the set of components I am
considering:
> Gigabyte GA-MA785GT-UD3H
> 2 Gb Corsair XMS3 Dominator DDR3
> AMD Athlon II X2 250
> Coolermaster RC-590
> 450W Corsair CMPSU-450HXUK, Modular
> 3x 2TB Hitachi Saturn
> This comes to around £600. Plus $120 for the unRaid OS on USB.
> Before I go ahead, just wanted to get some advice / input from the
forum to see if anyone can give me a pros/cons or alternate solution to
consider. Clearly the major drawback of moving from WHS is that I would
need a dedicated extra pc (like a basic XP Pro box) to manage the database
(MyMovies or Lobby server)as unRaid would just be a NAS with no app
capability, but if I can not get whs to stream or have files copied to it
easily, then I have no other choice.
> Thank you in advance for your kind input..
>
> K
>




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