DIY & Freenas VS ready solution for 2bays nas for home usage

[e-r-a-n]

Im having hard time deciding whether to buy a ready solution or building one my own.
I was looking at the qnap ts269l which seems very nice, good hardware & hdmi for using the device both as streamer/player & nas storage device.
I already have 2 x 1TB drives and a small 2.5" 320gb which I may plug as well (why not..)
my "wishlist" from a nas would be (except the obvious nas features..):
1. download station with rss, mostly torrents, with remote control (android's transmission would be best)
2. backup station, for 2 macbooks in my house
3. streaming data over the internet - would be nice if it could stream video content to ipad/android over the internet.
4. vpn server
5. optional - proxy server with ssl/https support, very basic web server
6. very optional - vsphere server, for occasional 1 virtual machine, nothing too serious

at the moment I have an android box which, if hdd is connected directly, can play content very well. but less boxes around my tv is always a good thing.
if such nas could also have xbmc over hdmi, that would be the best setup for me.
Im not looking for more than 2-3 bays, if in the future one hdd crashes, i can install a bigger one and that will be enough for me..so im not looking for future extension too much.

the qnap 269l can offer all of those features, and is about 500$ exl. shipment which is problematic to me area, as i barely found anyone who ships it outside usa/europe. in local shops its 200-250$ more, which is way too much for just 2bays machine.
so i could go for cheaper product as the qnap ts-220, without hdmi, but the hardware seems very limiting, marvell cpu? 0.5g ram?
its embedded linux as well, from my understanding freenas is freebsd so i can install any freebsd app over ssh, in cli, correct?

If i go to DIY solution, i prefer something small / portable / silent as possible.
since I have only hdd's, the question is what will give me better results? buying & building myself or having a ready solution?

 

[joeschmuck]

That qsnap is a very compact unit and based on the specs from the manufacturer it looks like a good product. Only you can answer your question. I can tell you that my FreeNAS system cost a fair amount of money and is fast, not very portable (meaning small and light). Others here have created compact FreeNAS machines with 4 drives, I'd say the price was comparable. But you should weigh the features of the qsnap to the features of FreeNAS including the cost and effort associated with setting up FreeNAS. It's a nice system but for some people it's not as forgiving to setup as other out of the box systems.

 

[e-r-a-n]

Thank you for your response.
The hardest part seems to find a small case such as the qnap.
hdmi + xbmc is possible with freenas?

 

[joeschmuck]

As for a small case, never going to be as small as the qnap since it's a product designed specifically for it's purpose. FreeNAS takes various parts to make a nice NAS.

As for hdmi, I personally do not know of any software you could add to FreeNAS that would take an HDMI output and feed it a movie. What we typically use is DLNA to transfer video, music and photos to a DLNA compliant device, such as a BluRay player or many new TVs have DLNA capability, or a video game system like PS3 or XBox. The video streams over Ethernet cable. Of course a simple thing to do is place your movies on an external USB drive and use them that way.

I think you can easily talk yourself into the qnap product, it looks very nice. I'd check out the support forums for that product to see what folks are bitching about before buying it. Also, FreeNAS is not a plug and play system, it does require some setup. FreNAS also offers expandability so if you wanted to run a web service or add some other software (almost anything FreeBSD) then you could add that. It's not just a NAS, it's much more but again it requires some level of effort to make it do what you want. You can also look at NAS4Free, another similar free product.

Good luck.

 

[survive]

Hi e-r-a-n,

For your media playback needs it might be worth looking into a dedicated media player box. I used to use a Patriot Box Office box that cost me ~$50.00 and I never ran into a file it couldn't display. What's nice about these sort of devices is they are tiny, silent & can read off CIFS & NFS shares, plus you get a proper remote to control it with.

-Will

 

[paleoN]

hdmi + xbmc is possible with freenas?

Theoretically - FreeBSD ZFS NAS with XBMC. Possible? It will probably require a fair bit of customizing though for FreeNAS. Like others have suggested I would simply use something else for playback.