Originally Posted by
Ryyu
I have long been battling with the same issue as you. As such, I have tried a few different setups. My two favorite, I'll outline below.
1. Synology NAS
This worked well for me to begin with. Synology have an amazing interface and fantastic built-in clients for Surveillance, File, Web and Torrenting servers. As I said this was great for me to begin with but as my needs grew (more disks and more space) I had to rethink my strategy.
Which leads me to number 2 and my current setup.
2. HTPC/Torrenting Box/Backup Server/File Server
Okay, I know, A lot of services on one machine but That's how I wanted to build it. A complete all in one box.
I have a Silverstone HTPC case which has two 5.25" drives, 3 x 3.25" and 1 x 2.5" HDD slots. I have customized the case a little.. I made use of the two 5.25" bay's by installing a 3-in-2 HotSwap cage in there with a Sata Backplane. So now I have 3 hotswap sata drives in the front of the computer and 3 internal hdd bays. In terms of other hardware, see below.
Hardware:
Silverstone HTPC Case
Mini ITX Mobo with HDMI on board
Core i5-2400 Processor (more than capable of 1080p playback
8GB Ram
3 x 1TB HDD's in Hot Swap
2 x 2TB HDD's (internal)
1 x 60GB SSD for OS
Software:
Windows 8
uTorrent
SickBeard
CouchPotato
XBMC
Custom Scripts for automation that I wrote.
I am running all of this on Windows 8. The reason I wanted to use Win8 was to make use of the StoragePools app that is built in to the OS. This allows me to pool all of my HDD's so the OS presents them as one drive with one drive letter. I can also create a softRAID set from the setup too.
So while it looks like I have 7TB of storage I really only have half (3.5TB) that because my data is being mirrored across all disks to create a backup. So if one drive fails, I can replace it without losing data. This may not be to everyone's liking but it's a setup I love and am proud to say I have built on my own.
As for torrenting etc. I am using uTorrent for all my downloads. I have a script that runs on torrent completion to copy the completed torrents to TV Shows or Movies folders (depending on the name) and then SickBeard and CouchPotato grab those files, process them and put them in the correct Movies and TV Shows directories. Once they have been processed XBMC is notified to update the library and add the new files.
All in all my Media Center is perfect for what I need. It is fully automated, and has plenty of space for me.
It does everything I need it to and a little more. :smile:
As I said, my setup wouldn't not be ideal for everyone but I just wanted to share what I had done.