So I am sure this has been covered but this is partly a throughput question and partly a "why should I go with unRAID over a diskless NAS" question. From the research I have done, I will spend about the same depending on the diskless solution and get better throughput (70MBps to 100MBps) over gigabit then i will with unRAID. I saw an old post from neilt0. As of right now I am just now starting to collect media so my storage is only in the 1TB range. I think the best way to go about this is to post my goals and see how you all respond.

 

I currently have direcTV. It is a great product in my opinion but not worth the $60 a month when I can get all my shows from iTunes and spend about $300 a year vs $720 a year. Yes I know about usenet. It is just not for me. So onward with my situation. I have an indoor antenna and an HDhomerun dual and am planning on building an A8-3850 HTPC over the next month. I want network storage for two reasons:

• Quiet HTPC operation
  
• Stream to other devices like xbox or other media player
  

I will be using windows media center because I think it is the most polished solution and it is free. I believe I need the best throughput I can get because I will be streaming recorded shows and recording shows over the network and most of the time at the same time. I also will most like have multiple HDHomeruns on the network. My plan is to buy a gigabit switch also so theoritically (not considering overhead) I should be able to max out at 125mbit/sec. O and also at the end of the day I need a high WAF approval.

 

I hope all of this makes sense and I appreciate the time and effort to discuss these things out with me. thank you!

In regards to worries about streaming recorded shows, and recording at the same time, you could add a cache drive so that the shows you're recording will be recorded to the cache drive, and the shows you're watching will be playing from a data drive.  Then at 3am (or whenever you schedule) the recorded shows will be moved to the data drive.

That is the thought process but with no experience doing it, I wanted some real world stats to gauge this by. thanks for your quick response!

I have an UnRaid server running 24/7. It hosts 3 VMs from virual box. I also record in HD realtime using SAGETV. My system is growing with about 1200 movies as a mix of DVD, Bluray, and Dishnetwork recordings. The NAS as holds database for XBMC, Popcorn hour, music, and backups with crashplan.

I do not have performance issues enless scanning the media for adding new fanart using MYMovies.

I can playback HD on one SAGETV while recording in HD. HD playback while ripping a movie and recording still not a problem. 

I will also transcode using airvideo to me iphone while doing the others with pefection.

I am using a core2 duo processer with 8 gigs of ram and 10 seagate low power 2 terabyte drives.

 

dont worry be happy as they say.

John

Thanks for the response JP.  Do you think that fact that you have 5 spindles vs my 2 with a cache drive will have an affect? In the business world, the more spindles the better but i just don't have the budget for it.

It would depend on use. If your were ripping to the same drive as trying to play a bluray from there would be issues as the disk is trying to write and read  and read the bluray at the same time.

If your were ripping to one and reading on the other than no issue. Spindles do help to distrubite the load around. I have one disk for sage recording that are live or just been recorded ( PVR if you will).I then have other disks with material by by type blu, dvd or recordings from sage that are saved off. Plus one more disk for crashplan backups, exchange server VM vmdk, and online videos saved. I also use a Cache drive for a XP vm for goofing with and an Untangle VM for routing and spam filtering.

Scanning of media is the biggest unknown load on the system and will cause a hickup or 2 during playback of movies/recordings. When copying a recording off the live disk to the archive disk and trying to watch a recording and record at the sametime has issues too, but that can be expected.

John

Sounds like I am just going to dive in and see how it goes :-)