Brand Noob with RAID Question

[John Herman]

I have an Asus A8V mobo, AMD Athlon 64x2 lying around. It can take 2 SATA drives. It also has hardware support for RAID on the mobo. The reason I am building a FreeNAS server, other than fun, is to have a movie and music server for several devices I have. I have not configured the actual FreeNAS server. I physically installed drives and installed FreeNAS 8 on an IDE drive in there.

I was going to go with RAID 1 to have redundancy. RAID 5 needs at least 3 disks so that's a no go and RAID 0 has no redundancy in case of disk failure.

Will there be a performance difference between using the mobo raid vs. the software raid in FreeNAS? Watching ripped DVDs is the most demanding thing I will be doing.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

 

[iJimmyC]

Hey..

From all of the literature I have read, it's best to let FreeNas do the RAIDing...

It's got advantages such as being able to recover from a mobo hardware failure.. Plus I think it was designed to take charge and likes things that way.

What are you using to stream movies though? I only ask out of interest as I'm thinking of building a dedicated media storage system and having a MacMini stream the movies etc through iTunes with only the referential files being in iTunes and the files stored on the NAS...

 

[John Herman]

I am using xbmc on apple tv. I have done this on an apple tv 1 and it worked great. Some people just rip the feature but on some dvd's I like to keep the whole iso and navigate the dvd menu's for the extra features. For less important dvd's I just rip the feature. I also have a WD TV Live Plus that can play video and audio.

Thanks for your response about the RAID.

 

[John Herman]

I will be using xbmc on an apple tv. I've played with that before and thought it was good. For some dvd rips I just use the whole iso, which is good if the dvd as useful extra's. For dvd's without extra's I just rip the feature. You can install xbmc and it should be great.

Thanks for your RAID response!