Total Newbie here with questions please help!!!!!

[MarzMan]

Hey Yall. I'm totally confused and, I think my head is about to explode!!! I'll try and get to the point quickly. First I wanted to buy a NAS so I could back up my Imac and the wifey's Macbook. Then I thought I'd build a NAS. I mean I've built a few gaming rigs in the past. It can't really be that much different. Then I ran across these ott boxes for the TV that run on andriod. One second let me back up a little. I have a really nice Panasonic Plasma but, Its really not that smart. I've been a dish network loyalist for years and, received the Hopper set up for free. I'm able to stream media from my Mac through the hopper to my plasma using kodi. The problem is that my media is taking up valuable realestate on my mac. This is kind of why I'm here. Like I said before I'm probably going to build my NAS out of an old Micro tower I have. Then I thought why buy the ott box, can't I make my nas do the samething. Kind of like a NAS/Media Server then I can cut out dish altogether. I've been reading all kinds of info but, have yet to come across a clear cut answer. The few other things is that I want to stay away from any windows OS.

The build would consist of:

MB: Gigabyte GA-F2A88XM-D3HP

CPU: AMD A-8 7600K

RAM: 8GB of dual channel DDR3 2133 G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series

SSD: 120GB SAMSUNG 850 EVO

HDD: 4TB HGST Deskstar NAS for Media

HDD: 2-2TB WD Red - one for my backup the other for my wifes backup

Is this the right thinking or do I have it wrong and, if so please correct me. Thank You.

 

[phbigred]

If you "care" about the data you are loading consider a parity drive.

Gridrunner put together the basics of what unraid is and how it works. Apple iMacs are able to talk to unraid fine. For what the hopper can see I don't know what app it uses unless it's a upnp server share. It might be worth considering a roku stick too. Plex and kodi both can run docker containers.

[stublehustle]

If you "care" about the data you are loading consider a parity drive.

Gridrunner put together the basics of what unraid is and how it works. Apple iMacs are able to talk to unraid fine. For what the hopper can see I don't know what app it uses unless it's a upnp server share. It might be worth considering a roku stick too. Plex and kodi both can run docker containers.

 

2nd on the parity drive, it can save you a lot of headaches down the road. Also depending on how much data you will be moving at a time a larger ssd might be useful. Otherwise the rest of the hardware looks more than adequate unless you plan to stream more than 2 streams of media content at a time, then I would recommend a better cpu.

 

 

[wgstarks]

You also don't necessarily need to get separate drives for each TM backup. unRAID will let you create 2 size limited Time Machine shares from the data array.

[MarzMan]

Thanks for all the feedback. I'm still a little in the dark on the parity drive thing is, that when it writes to both drives. I'm a real greenhorn. I've never really dealt with using a raid setup so, I'm learning on the go. Sorry. I just want to run kodi with the addons and, be able to stream my media, as well as backups. I would hook into the plasma via HDMI and, connect to the network with a wired connection. The Hopper has DNLA and, I believe it is upnp. Thanks again to all

[garycase]

No, parity doesn't replicate your data on another drive.    It maintains a longitudinal parity bit so that ALL of your drives are fault-tolerant => i.e. if any drive fails you can still access its data and can easily replace it with another drive.  Single parity (one parity drive) can sustain any single drive failure with no data loss.  Dual parity (2 parity drives) can sustain 2 drive failures with no parity loss.

 

It's absolutely a good idea to have at least one parity drive, so your system is fault tolerant.

 

Note, however, that this does NOT take the place of backups => you should still have any important data backed up in another place.

 

[garycase]

Note that the guide referenced above [available here:  http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=56207 ] has a video that explains how the parity calculation works.  Definitely worth watching.

 

[MarzMan]

Many Thanks and Cheers to you Gary Case