[mythtv-users] Media server? Unraid vs Freenas

[David King]

On 3/8/20 8:26 PM, Jim Abernathy wrote:
>
> On 3/8/20 8:13 PM, Ian Evans wrote:
>> For those of you storing your video collections on a media server,
>> are you using Unraid, Freenas or something else? And why that choice?
>>
> My current production mythtv backend has a boot drive and 4-2TB drives
> setup as 2-2TB Mirrors. Since I'm using Ubuntu Server 18.04 I opted
> for the mdadm RAID that is internal to Ubuntu.  It works great and is
> relatively easy to manage. I have lost 1 drive at a time several times
> in the last 2 years and the replacement has been easy. I get an email
> when I lost the drive and I shutdown, replace the drive, and reboot
> then 2 commands later the new drive is being recovered.
>
> Having used FreeNAS in the past, I feel that it adds a level of
> complexity that I don't need. I setup a NFS and SAMBA share on the
> Ubuntu server so I still can use it as a NAS for my home.

I too use internal mdadm RAID, for reasons of speed and reliability.  I
previously (for ~10 years) used an external RAID box (Mediasonic
HFR2-SU3S2) that appeared to my OS, and therefore to MythTV, as if it
was just a really big single disk.  I used e-SATA (3Gbps) to attach that
to the MythTV server at first but it was a bit slow and occasionally had
annoying disk errors.  I tried attaching it with USB3 (5Gbps), which was
faster, but didn't solve the disk error problem.  With my latest
hardware upgrade a year ago I moved all the disks inside the PC case,
attached with regular SATA (6Gbps) via an Intel RAID adapter that's
built into the motherboard and managed through mdadm.  I have a
four-disk 12TB RAID 5 array that's about half full.  I use the MytHTV
backend plus a SMB share off that box as my media server, feeding a
desktop workstation, a laptop, a tablet and three NVidia Shields.  The
workstation runs the MythTV frontend so that I can do admin stuff,
editing (manually creating cutlists) and transcoding on it.  The rest of
the devices run the Android MythTV app or Kodi with the MythTV plugin or
both, depending on their capabilities.

My concern with the idea of a NAS would be that editing and transcoding
videos would go back to being even worse, i.e., slower (1Gbps) and
buggier, than they were when I was accessing my disks at e-SATA or USB3
speeds.  If all I was doing from the NAS was playback of static video
files, I expect that could be ok.  But my previous experience would make
me worry if I planned to do anything from the NAS that involved
read/write access to the files like recording, editing or transcoding.

Dave

David King
dave at daveking dot com