[Jim]

I keep thinking of getting a NAS for all my media storage and having it always on so can access it on either the HTPC, netbook or the big computer as opposed to having it in the big computer and leaving it on when I want to access the media. What is the power consumption of a NAS and is it more enviromentally/cost friendly than leaving than running it from the big computer bearing in mind the big computer only stays on most of the day when someone is home (half the week) and then only the evenings for the other half the week and the NAS will be always on. If I get the NAS I will also be looking to use a hibernate/standby facility more on the big computer

[Bubba]

The power consumption on mine is 9.9w on standby with the fan running, 9.6w with no fan.

Goes up to 26w with both disks being written to. Peak power is 75w when starting a drive, but that will be a super-short spike I guess.

Having a quick google it looks like an average PC is using 70 to 80w when Idle so a NAS could definitely help.

[Jim]

sounds like its worth doing then

[slackline]

Didn't do the exact maths, and haven't done any benchmarking but the numbers quoted for the NSLU2 with two USB drives connected seemed to make sense compared to building a dedicated server.

One major bonus is if you get one thats upgradeable you can install the Transmission bittorrent client on there which runs headlessly and you can access and manage your torrents through a built in web-interface so it'll sit there and do all the downloading for you in the background.

[Jim]

what about back up?
I've got 2 1TB drives,1 to back the other p.
Does a nas do raid, what raid do I need and is there an alternative to raid on a nas?
will be buying a SSD to run my OS off for the big computer

[Bubba]

My NAS will RAID quite happily but I've not gone with it, have taken the full capacity of 2 drives and will just upgrade the drives every couple of years instead.

It'll support RAID 0, RAID 1, JBOD or SPAN.

You can use FAT32/EXT2/EXT3 - i've gone with EXT3 as it doesn't really need to be defragged.

As Slackline says, the Transmisison BT client runs quite happily.

[Falling Down]

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