Alexandria - NAS & Media Library
Name: Alexandria
Function: NAS & Media Library
Specs:
Fractal Designs Node 304
ASRock FM2A88X-ITX+ Mobo
AMD A8-6500 APU
8GB Kingston DDR3 PC1600 RAM
3 x 3TB 7200RPM Toshiba HDD
Sandisk Enterprise 32GB mSATA SSD
Finding myself rather tired of lugging around hundreds of DVDs, hundreds of CDs and rather a lot of LPs I decided it was high time to "Go Digital". So I've built a nice shiny NAS to store all of my various media and what-not. I don't need anything super powerful for this box, the most it will be doing is transcoding a movie or two on the fly, so I figured AMD's A8-6500 APU should do the trick, 65W at 3.5Ghz seems pretty fair to me. I was going to go the whole hog and get ECC RAM and maybe an Opty but it was just a touch racy in the end for my little server. So then it was on to storage, I want a little protection so decided to RAID-5 3 x 3TB SATA drives. That should give me plenty of space for all my music and DVDs (assuming I rip the DVDs to X264 and the CDs to FLAC). Plus space left over to backup my PC. I searched for a pretty and small case and eventually settled on Fractal Designs' Node 304 which looks rather server-like. Needing some internal storage for OS, software, etc I went for a little 32GB mSATA SSD for that stuff to keep it nice and fast.
Software wise I decided to go with OpenMediaVault. It has a nice web GUI for management, and a plugin system for adding new bits on. I've added OMVExtras repo which makes Plex available. Plex is then being used for transcoding and streaming all media, I've also enabled the DLNA server to stream to my hifi. I also run a couple of VMs in KVM for testing / playing with various bits. I back up the NAS to Google Cloud nearline storage. I used a GCP setup guide from Scott Helme to get the cloud backup going and it's working nicely, just costs 8 quid a month, pretty reasonable if you ask me!
