DIY media server: how do?

October 27, 2015 7:41 AM

Right now I have an archaic NAS with Windows Home Server. WHS isn't supported anymore and I'm increasingly terrified that something is going to break and we'll be SOL. My goal for the remains of 2015 is to deal with this.

Our needs are simple: mostly we want to store and stream audio and video across our home wifi. Our household devices are Windows/Android/Chromium. (I'd be interested in serving media outside of the home wifi, but I'm not sure Verizon Fios would be very happy about that and it's not a priority.) Simplicity and ease of set-up/administration is a high priority. I'm a bit of a tinkerer and proficient novice but my husband is not a natural with this sort of thing.

Here's what I've got going on thus far:

Recently my work surplussed a bunch of Dell towers (hard drives removed, otherwise perfectly functional and relatively recent), so I picked one of those up thinking I could turn it into a new media server. Its previous life was probably in a similar role in a classroom because when we opened it up, it has an absurd amount of RAM.

So, I know I need a HD with an OS. Question 1 is: which OS? Do I need a server OS like Windows Server or are the things I've been hearing about Windows 10 making a perfectly cromulent media server true? I'm by no means a server admin by trade (I'm help desk for a very specific sliver of technologies, none of which require me to know boo about servers or networking), so the easier the OS is to deal with and make it do what I want, the happier I will be.

For storage, I figured I'd pick up one of these. Right now my NAS has 4 bays and I've got drives in 3 of them. I do want some sort of RAID system. Question 2 : Am I correct about that (or something very much like that) being what I need in order to get the several TB of storage I need?

If I get one of those, will that require me to use Windows Server, or will it play with Win10?

Please also feel free to talk about things like Plex and the like (I looked into Plex and I just could not figure out what it was or what I needed to make it work as something that could stream to multiple devices wirelessly). Use small words.

posted by soren_lorensen to Technology (17 answers total)

*Why* do you want some sort of raid system? 4TB hard drives are under $150 these days. You can get an 8TB drive for like $275.

Any OS is going to be fine. Really, for home streaming needs, you never needed a "server" OS imo, just something reliable. I'd do linux because I'm familiar with it and it's very easy to get remote access to it from anywhere without requiring something as heavy as remote desktop.

There's no reason you can't serve stuff to the internet at large. I've been doing it from home for at least a decade. No one cares.
posted by RustyBrooks at 7:48 AM on October 27, 2015

"wirelessly" isn't really an issue. From a server and client point of view, it's just ethernet. Maybe a slowish and crappy ethernet.

Plex is fantastic at maintaining a media library, though you have to put in some work in order to make it come out nice. Clients are available for most devices.

Your hardware isn't really suitable and you're looking for easy, so I won't suggest FreeNAS as an option. However, there are several other NAS software packages that you may wish to explore such as OpenMediaVault.
posted by jgreco at 7:51 AM on October 27, 2015

I use Amahi for this. It's not expensive. You will need some technical skills to get it to work, but it is much easier than other Linux-based options that I tried. I don't know how well it will support Windows.
posted by Grinder at 7:55 AM on October 27, 2015

Response by poster: *Why* do you want some sort of raid system?

I'm probably still living in the past vis-a-vis drive sizes (in my day, 2TB was impressive, up hill, both ways!), but having everything on one drive makes me nervous.
posted by soren_lorensen at 7:57 AM on October 27, 2015

I've got an old laptop set up for doing this. After experimenting with a couple of Linux distributions and having no end to problems and figuring out how to do it, I ended up landing on Windows 10 running Plex and a shared directory. Works like a charm.
posted by General Malaise at 8:13 AM on October 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

My tech knowledge is so out of date that I'm functionally illiterate. That said, I've been using Plex for a year or so. It's pretty straightforward provided you name your files in accordance with their specs. That took me a while to do, but I just did a few a day until I was done. The server is installed on my Win7 box (that I use for most day-to-day stuff) and while my music is on that internal drive, my video files are on external hard drives. I run an ethernet cord to my Roku box out by the tv and have an excellent experience for my limited purposes.
posted by CincyBlues at 8:20 AM on October 27, 2015

Oh, and I keep all my files backed up on separate external drives...just in case!
posted by CincyBlues at 8:22 AM on October 27, 2015

With the same front end as you we run an old 2-drive NAS mounted as a shared drive on our various (Windows 10 ad Android) computers. One of the computers runs Plex pointed at the video and music directories on the NAS.

Works great for us. The NAS gives us the flexability of a shared document space, while plex streams to the Chromecast on the TV. Could do this with a shared directory on the office (plex) pc I suppose, but the NAS works well enough.

The real question is network throughput if you want to do multiple streams. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer to have as much of my network on GB ethernet as possible. This has served our set-up quite well.
posted by bonehead at 8:30 AM on October 27, 2015

I think you really do want some sort of RAID - not for size, but for resilience. Disks fail, and RAID makes replacing them trivial.

I'm only serving up audio - but my four-bay ReadyNas has done a good job with that for a few years. Also has some video-serving features, but I haven't used them much. Current models seem to have Plex, iTunes server & DLNA. It would be smaller & lower on power consumption than a tower, I think. It has a small Linux server built into the enclosure, which handles streaming services. There's a command line for admin if you want it, but for practical purposes there's little/no need to use it - you can do most admin from a browser-based GUI.

Unless you want (or could use) Win10 for other reasons, IMHO it may be overkill when you can probably do it all from the NAS itself.
posted by rd45 at 8:52 AM on October 27, 2015

Keep in mind that while a Plex server running natively on the NAS can stream from many consumer raid systems, many (most?) don't have the horsepower to do scaling or on-the-fly conversions. Thus running Plex server on a second PC may be necessary.
posted by bonehead at 9:03 AM on October 27, 2015

RAID is nice and everything but the contents of your media server are probably changing rarely. rsync the contents nightly or weekly to a backup disk and save yourself whatever a RAID array costs plus the mindspace of operating one. Just IMO. Keep it simple.
posted by RustyBrooks at 9:04 AM on October 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

Many RAID devices can do this, sync out to an attached USB drive. That's my back-up strategy.
posted by bonehead at 9:07 AM on October 27, 2015

So, right now sounds like you basically have a barebones Dell tower. Here's what I would do, given that I would want to spend the least to meet my needs:

- Buy SSD for running the OS.
- Buy 2 or 4 drives depending on how much storage I needed - splurge a little on faster "server" drives that are made for this kind of stuff.
- Install Windows 10 on the Dell, using the SSD as the boot drive.
- Install the drives within the tower.
- Use Windows 10 built in RAID support (I believe it's called Storage Spaces in Win10) to create 1 or 2 RAID1* pairs to hold my media. I think MS calls RAID1 "two-way pool".
- Install Plex Server on the SSD.
- Plug the Dell into an ethernet port on my router.

Then install Plex on each device in my house that wants to stream media. That Dell should also be able to transcode and let me stream to my phone when I'm not at home.


* I may get flack for it, but in my position I'd just use RAID1. Since I'm storing replaceable media I'm more concerned about drive failure as opposed to data corruption or accidental deletion. If I'm storing important stuff like photos on these drives then I'd back up only the important stuff continuously to the cloud using something like CrashPlan, installed on the SSD.
posted by homesickness at 10:07 AM on October 27, 2015

I'd like to throw out Emby as an alternative to Plex. I've recently started using it and I like it quite a bit.
posted by Otis at 11:11 AM on October 27, 2015

Raid 1 and done, if you care about the media itself then back it up somewhere, crashplan works great.

I used a number of dedicated NAS OS's for years and recently switched to just plain old Windows 10, it's easier to use now and more reliable than getting SMB working flawlessly on unix kernel based NAS OS's.
posted by Cosine at 11:20 AM on October 27, 2015

All this is making me feel inadequate for running Windows 7 Pro and just sharing my media drive via CIFS.
posted by Gev at 6:37 AM on October 28, 2015

*Why* do you want some sort of raid system? 4TB hard drives are under $150 these days. You can get an 8TB drive for like $275.

Because hardware fails. The point of RAID here isn't speed, it's to protect against a drive failing. Anything that I consider important goes onto at least two disks.

As to the OP: 1) BACK THAT NAS UP NOW!!! The easiest way to not worry about the NAS dying and taking your data with it is to copy the data to other drives.

2) Test those backups. Olson's rule of data protection: I don't do backups. I do restores. Backups are just a step in the process.

As to the media server.

1) Be careful loading an average Dell with lots of drives. They tend to have low capacity power supplies.

2) Linux and the like can work, but getting SMB running on them is a bit harder than on Windows, which comes with SMB ready to go. So, the tradeoff is cost vs. time, and I suspect your time is worth more than the Windows license cost.

I may get flack for it, but in my position I'd just use RAID1.

Actually, I'm right there with you -- though if the option is there, I'd make it RAID-10. On two drives, there's no real difference, except on most controllers, you can't expand a RAID-1, it's always just a mirror pair, where you can add another pair of drives to a 2 drive RAID-10.

If you have more than 2TB disks, I really can't recommend RAID-5. The rebuild times are so long that there's a significant chance you'll lose another disk. If you're going that route, you really want RAID-6, but if you have less than 5 drives, RAID-10 gets you the same capacity, more protection, and more speed.

I don't know if I'd bother with an SSD for the boot drive -- the only time you should see significant IO on that is during boot, but the costs on SSDs have dropped to the point where you might as well use one. But if I already had an HDD, I'd probably just use that. That's just me, though.
posted by eriko at 10:29 AM on October 28, 2015