NAS OS question

[chavo]

Hi,

I am considering creating a NAS computer. I have an old HP micro tower (1gb Ram, c2d 2ghz cpu.)and I have 2 1tb drives. I would like to connect to the drives from a few windows 7 PC’s and a couple of Linux based freesat boxes that can play MKV’s. I would require streaming 1080 content, will it be able to do it? I use a HP Pro curve gigabit switch.

Which NAS OS would you use for this project? I would like to have a good user interface and the OS would need to pick up and recognise all the components in the PC including a gigabit network card.

Thanks

[FatalSaviour]

Personally I'd use either FreeNAS or OpenFiler if it's purely for use as a NAS role. If you've got the time, it might be worth giving them a try and seeing which one you prefer?
Hope that helps!

[jim]

There's loads of info here: http://forums.hexus.net/shopping-ret...ver-100-a.html

The general consensus seemed to be Openfiler, and that's what I've gone with. It's very good, extremely stable (and beyond that I'm not sure I'm particularly fussy), but I have to say it wasn't the easiest to set up.

Had to muck around with quite a lot of command line stuff to get it to actually work properly, and getting it to work on a Windows network takes far more configuration than you would think was necessary. Not to mention that documentation is paid for, and therefore if you're a cheapskate, lacking.

[chavo]

Thanks chaps, had a crack on freenas yesterday and it installed on to a thumb drive without any problems, having a few setup issues but i have spotted some tutorials on the likes of you tube so i will have a look around. thanks for the tips.

[pardal51]

There's loads of info here: http://forums.hexus.net/shopping-ret...ver-100-a.html

The general consensus seemed to be Openfiler, and that's what I've gone with. It's very good, extremely stable (and beyond that I'm not sure I'm particularly fussy), but I have to say it wasn't the easiest to set up.

Had to muck around with quite a lot of command line stuff to get it to actually work properly, and getting it to work on a Windows network takes far more configuration than you would think was necessary. Not to mention that documentation is paid for, and therefore if you're a cheapskate, lacking.

I used to run OF 2.3 without issues (iscsi for VMware lab). Then bought HP Microserver and decided to go OF 2.99. It was very fiddly to configure as you described and I decided to give Freenas a try. Much easier to setup/config and does everything OF does. I have 2 HDDS on iscsi for VMware lab and 2HDD for windows shares Samba/CIFS. So far so good.

My vote is OF 2.3 or Freenas 0.8

HTH

[kmac]

Been using Freenas now for some time without a hiccup. Only issue I have is their DLNA server doesn't work with my Sony BD player ( I'm not using the latest version of Freenas and I'm told the latest should work)