New to NAS and could use some help

[chesbrougha]

Hey all, just built my first hackintosh and now am in need of a major storage solution (and as soon as possible). Found this fourm and am pumped about it.

My main workstation is a Macbook Pro Retina. I edit video through thunderbolt/esata sonnet pro adaptor and 6gb/s expresscard. I am getting solid speeds of around 200 mb/s so because I like to stay mobile and going to continue to edit using this solution. BUT I need a storage solution and here are my issues:

1. MPRr only had two thunderbolt ports and they are both being used (esata adaptor and dell U2711)
--transfer speeds to the NAS are going to be extremely slow until I get a thunderbolt hub so that I can get the ethernet adaptor
2. I am new to building servers and am a little lost. I would like to run all my media (via plex) from this server, use it as a backup solution, as well as use it to encode/transcode video from Final Cut 7/X and Adobe (not sure if that is possible...I currently use my hackintosh to do the heavy transcoding and uploading so that my workstation remains free)
3. I have read some recommended builds but the ones that are spelled out seem a little dated. Going to continue to look around but if anyone has a build that they are super pumped about it would be great if they could send me the components.

Great to be here, looking forward to getting this going

 

[cyberjock]

There's a section of the forum dedicated to people discussing their build, parts list, etc.

 

[bollar]

Just a couple of thoughts:

- First off, there is no Plex for FreeNAS (or FreeBSD), so you won't be able to run Plex on this server unless you create some sort of virtualiztion -- this is documented, but IMO, this increases the complexity of the build. I currently store media files on the NAS and run Plex on a Mac. Would love to have Plex on the NAS, though.
- Using iSATA, you can probably get 70+ Mbps to the server -- faster than Firewire, but not as fast as Thunderbolt -- probably fast enough for storage.