NAS for Recorded TV (Including LiveTV Buffer location)

[TheOsburnFamil]

I'm looking at buying a small NAS device along the lines of a QNAP 419 series for all my recorded tv, including the livetv buffer.

I'm curious what others have experienced in this arena. Specifically, I have dual Ceton cards (8 Tuners), and there could potentially be a lot of data hitting this thing at once (writes from the recording buffer and reads from multiple xboxes in the house).

Opinions?

Thanks!

[Scallica]

I think the best approach is to keep recorded TV and the live TV buffer on a local drive, then archive/copy shows to the NAS with a scheduled task.

[Danno100]

Media Center won't let you record directly to a NAS unless you fool the OS. The QNAP is not going to be fast enough at writing if in a RAID 5 config and you have multiple HD streams.

I have a QNAP NAS, and it is OK for storage. But for TV recording, you need a PC anyway. You could even skip the NAS, and set up Win 7 with RAID 5. All the benefits of a NAS except it'll suck a lot more power and be noisier.

[Venom51]

Most of the NAS boxes that are affordable have nothing less than horrid performance. They are built to be cheap and consume as little power as possible. 2 things that do not equate to a performance NAS box.

I went with a BYOB solution that while not exactly the most power freindly solution it does pack some really good performance into a fairly inexspensive box. Look around Ebay at the many Rackable servers for sale. Most are going to be in the sub 300 range and will pack dual Quad core Xeon's and 8 to 16 gigs of memory. Throw something like Openfiler or Freenas on it and drop the drive size of your choice in it and you got a nice box.

Thes best performance in my testing was with a Raid 10 array. It's fast but you essentially lose half the capacity of the drives you are going to put in it. I've got 4x1TB drives in all of mine and unfortunately lose 2 TB per box. That however was not my concern when I built them I wanted good VM performance and to never have to worry about a drive bottleneck on the DVRNAS machine that hosts all the recorded content.

I pulled one of my older server out last night and dropped WIndows Essentials Server 2012 RC on it just to take a look at where Microsoft is headed. I have to say while the Home server guys are going to hate the price they have made the process of setting up an AD domain as simple as typing in the domain name you'd like to use and hitting next...

It gets even better as the media center intergration as it existed in Home server appears to be included. I think the prie is the only thing likely to scare folks away from it.