miketew

yeah, I have no interest in expansion requiring 2 disks for the size of 1 each time 😛 but I was not aware ZFS was that far along with expansion officially, that's awesome.

in this case, unraid's ZFS plugin essentially renders part of unraid's draw (mix and match disks) somewhat moot, as it behaves just like a normal ZFS zpool with the inability to scale out or scale up. is that right?

A couple thoughts... maybe I'm missing something. Isn't SnapRAID essentially the same concept as Unraid - parity calculated "externally" - Unraid does it at runtime, SnapRAID does it on request, but neither provides bitrot protection via detection. Simply by restoration (if I detect a file has become corrupted, I can restore from parity) Also would be very curious how ZFS gets introduced, instead of XFS or BTRFS for a disk's filesystem, it would be simply a single disk zvol? I would expect performance could be more affected then. Also, seems like the only benefit there would be help detecting bitrot happening (which is a good thing)

i tried it. couldn't get my remote to work, display was pitifully slow. it was using onboard intel graphics on my brand new shuttle. someone else posted with the same box and said it worked flawlessly, but that's the issue with DIY... i didn't buy the shuttle FOR it, so i only messed around a little bit. as with everything (especially X11-based stuff) YMMV

ah i am perfect with linux. i'd prefer if it was one platform and linux is so much easier to maintain. not to mention (depending on what hardware really needs to be there) you could possily run it inside of a VM anyway.

thanks, if i wind up doing this in the near future i'll reference this thread as a start. VIA has a mini-itx/etc mobo with HDMI output, i wonder how well VIA drivers work, or ATI...

i know that. they're not identical but from what i saw when looking at how to build XBMC it's mainly just a different build environment. seems like it should compile just fine under windows too, without many tweaks. but i'm sure many people more knowledgable about the subject dismissed that already you mentioned vizio - i have a vizio 47" 1080p TV (model GV47LF http://www.vizio.com/products/detail.aspx?pid=20) - is the issue you mention something simply remedied? tell me it wasn't fixed by actually having to buy/use a different TV...

i expect everything to run fine on decent hardware. i'm talking about mkv files on my -normal- xbox. i don't want windows. i would prefer linux. i said i'm surprised a port hasn't come out sooner. since you have to compile XBMC proprietary format i would think it's just as easy to compile everything to windows format too, since it appears all the tools run on windows... and yeah, i know they are using different tools in linux now. i mainly don't want to fuss with even more hardware at the moment to try it out and be disappointed. does your nvidia 7 series export component or HDMI? i guess DVI to HDMI adapter isn't that bad. will it do 1080p?

I am running it at the moment (just to play around) on a Mini-ITX VIA C7, it recognizes both ethernet interfaces and my SATA disks and my compact flash card on the back of the motherboard. I actually have copied the (trial) unRAId over to my compactflash/ubuntu install, and was able to boot it, and then remount it later. it didn't want to boot directly from the flash, but I might have done something wrong. Anyway, I'm sure with some tweaking it could be setup to run entirely off the compactflash card (well, I don't know, the serial number stuff might mess with it) - I haven't really tried anything else other than messing around with adding drives and stuff. I'm trying to see the performance I get over SMB too once I setup a share.

got it. i found a post on avsforum where someone gave some in-depth info. unraid is a pretty neat idea. i couldn't boot off my flash drive on my little mini-itx VIA system, so i copied things on top of an existing linux install and added it manually to grub. it actually boots, and just needed the flash drive mounted as /boot after it booted up unraid. i'm just messing around right now.

I'm slightly confused. At first my friend and I thought it was just a frontend to LVM/MD. However, it looks like it uses MD, but not like a typical RAID setup. In the UI, you have to reference a specific disk for parity. This opens up a few questions like what if the parity disk is smaller than (N-1) disks? i.e. if the parity drive was 500G and the other disks were all 750's? Does it still use MD as a software raid? I clicked "format" and it appears like all the disks are treated individually. Is there some sort of proprietary layer that makes sure parity blocks are stored for everything? (FYI I would love it if XFS was used instead of reiser. I suppose I could try to hack that myself somewhere. I definately want to learn more!)

i love xmbc. i bought an xbox just for that. even at 1080i the menus are so crisp and nice. it skips through things properly, mounts over samba and plays ISO files like native disks. it basically supports all video formats i'll ever care about in the near future too. except when i try mkv files and such it definately shows the weak processor, it's somewhat noisy too. i don't understand why it has taken so long for anyone to make an xbmc port for linux (or even windows) - i mean, mplayer already runs natively on linux. i would think it would be more difficult to make xbmc run on an xbox due to the proprietary executable format, not vice versa! when i asked on the xbmc for linux channel they basically said "it might not even work for what you want" so i haven't really bothered yet. but mainly just divx/xvid/iso playback with samba mounting support (and normal skipping controls) is the majority of what i care about... and of course a remote control that makes sense (would be great for DVD navigation, it's a little funky right now on a normal xbmc) those requests shouldn't be too hard... it sounds like it wouldn't be too difficult to try it out on my own though, but i wanted to try using at least 1080i if not 1080p, and i would need to get a decent video card for that, not to mention a PC that would fit it (i don't have any pci express boxes, all mine are 3 year old shuttle XPCs...) - so that's been another reason.

Seagates are the best with their no-hassle 5 year warranties - on all drives, retail and OEM. <3 Seagate. I sent back a bunch of 400 gig SATA and IDE drives, and they must have been out - they sent me back all 500's instead. Anyway, I picked up 4 of these the last time Fry's had this sale. I'm still trying to find the right enclosure/software to handle them... gonna try unraid here in a few minutes on my Mini-ITX system...

it would be cool if it could be copied to an HD/compactflash/etc. i have a 2 gig compactflash on the underside of my motherboard for OS booting. the case has a front door that makes plugging in usb devices impossible if the door is closed. i'd have to stick this in the back, which means it has to stick out from the wall, possibly could be bumped out etc...

i had one of those cases, and 3 of the 4-in-3 units. i sold it though, i wanted smaller 4 or 5 disk type NAS units. it was a decent box though, although annoying if you ever needed to replace broken drives