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The HP microservers are indeed an exceedingly good deal. If my array didn't require 36 drive bays, I would probably be using one as well.

It also gives you the advantages of flexibility, allowing you to use more advanced filesystems like ZFS or BTRFS or UnRAID.

Nonetheless I see the original question has already been answered...

---------- Post added at 00:16 ---------- Previous post was at 00:07 ----------

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

and that RAID 5 isn't exactly incredible as far as recovery of data goes. You may find that you'd rather simply back it all up for performance, or if you really want to be secure and don't mind losing the space use RAID 1+0.

What he said. Also something that a lot of people overlook... RAID is not a substitute for a backup.

I cannot emphasize this enough.

Also I would suggest RAID 6 over RAID 1+0 if you wanted more security - RAID6 is guaranteed to survive any combination of any 2 drive failures, RAID1+0 will lose data in 33% of possible 2-drive failure combinations (and not to be confused with RAID 0+1 which will lose data in 66% of 2-drive failures).

Incidentally your storage requirements are insane. I can't even fill a single 3TB drive let alone 2 of them! Then again maybe your storage requirements are normal and I just don't have much content locally, I'm very 'cloudy'.

If you call a 4-bay NAS filled with 4TB drives is insane, I'd love to know how you'd describe my NAS setup in my utility room



---------- Post added at 00:19 ---------- Previous post was at 00:16 ----------

Originally Posted by Qtx

I was eyeing up the N54L a few years ago for a NAS but decided for once I didn't want the hassle of building and configuring everything from scratch. It was a hard choice as you would get much better specs for your money with a microserver. The fact they tend to be noisy too was another factor. Wanted it in the front room connected to a switch near the tv so glad I went with the DS213J at the time It has a fan but it's so quiet I can't actually hear it even with the tv turned off

Might reconsider a microserver once the whole property is properly network wired so I can stick one in a utility room or another room.

The HP is notoriously quiet thanks to its large diameter fans and passively cooled mainboard.

As far as the hassle of building and configuring - there's quite a few NAS-dedicated *nix distributions out there that install as an appliance and present the same sort of administrative web interface as the Synology NAS units.

---------- Post added at 00:28 ---------- Previous post was at 00:19 ----------

Originally Posted by Stuart

Yes, I know that most NAS drives can do DNLA, but I have a variety of devices and I'd like a device with enough power to convert the media to whatever form is needed on the fly..

I use a package called Mezzmo to stream and convert the media. Be interesting to see if that microserver is up to the task of on the fly conversion.

It depends more on the source content to be honest. Streaming encoders are really fast these days and use far less resources than archival encoders. I have a 2Ghz dual-core AMD Athlon64 system which is actually perfectly sufficient for encoding 1080p streaming content to various devices, as long as the source bitrate doesn't exceed ~20Mbps or so. Above that bitrate, it has too little CPU power to decode the source content quickly enough!

The N54L is a much newer architecture and faster so should have no problems.