HTPC/NAS - Together or Separately?
Posted: Thu Aug 02, 2012 7:52 am
I am looking to build an HTPC to stick behind the TV in the front room. I would install something like XBMC on it, so I can watch all my TV shows and films with that like your typical HTPC set up.
So this has few requirements, be small and quiet, very little actual storage need apart from obviously the media, and only just powerful enough to decode 1080p.
The NAS I want to build needs to support up to 6 3.5" HDDs. This already complicates a hybrid setup here because not many HTPC cases have room for so many HDDs. This would also probably go behind the TV in the same place as where I'd like an HTPC. But it may prove too loud, in which case it would be better off sited elsewhere.
This could be any size, should be as quiet as possible (but is it possible to get 6 3.5" drives quiet enough to be within 2/3 metres of you trying to watch a film with quiet parts?), and of course needs only consist of the bare minimum needed to link up to a network and manage a RAID5 array with mdadm.
SO:
At first glance it looks like it would be ideal to combine these two into one machine, but that limits me a lot on what case I need to choose. Unless I went for an off the shelf solution for both, but in that case there's not much room for me to play with customising things like software setups, which I do like to do. Especially as the NAS could essentially be an always-on Linux machine where I could run things like a home hosted website to share my media.
What I'm looking for is other users' experiences of having both a NAS and HTPC, what they think of them being best separately, are there any other usage situations you'd wished they were combined as one or it would have been cheaper/better value to build one machine? Are there any realistic case options for the two as separate units?
Please let me know if I should clarify anything. Thanks.
So this has few requirements, be small and quiet, very little actual storage need apart from obviously the media, and only just powerful enough to decode 1080p.
The NAS I want to build needs to support up to 6 3.5" HDDs. This already complicates a hybrid setup here because not many HTPC cases have room for so many HDDs. This would also probably go behind the TV in the same place as where I'd like an HTPC. But it may prove too loud, in which case it would be better off sited elsewhere.
This could be any size, should be as quiet as possible (but is it possible to get 6 3.5" drives quiet enough to be within 2/3 metres of you trying to watch a film with quiet parts?), and of course needs only consist of the bare minimum needed to link up to a network and manage a RAID5 array with mdadm.
SO:
At first glance it looks like it would be ideal to combine these two into one machine, but that limits me a lot on what case I need to choose. Unless I went for an off the shelf solution for both, but in that case there's not much room for me to play with customising things like software setups, which I do like to do. Especially as the NAS could essentially be an always-on Linux machine where I could run things like a home hosted website to share my media.
What I'm looking for is other users' experiences of having both a NAS and HTPC, what they think of them being best separately, are there any other usage situations you'd wished they were combined as one or it would have been cheaper/better value to build one machine? Are there any realistic case options for the two as separate units?
Please let me know if I should clarify anything. Thanks.