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[Aimless]

Hi!

I'd like some tips and recommendations for a cheap/good value NAS + personal cloud + media-center + torrent-machine solution for all our photos, music and porn TV-shows and movies there are usually two windows 8 PCs and two android tablets on the network. I'd be especially happy if it could be managed easily and painlessly through windows, and if file-management could be managed easily and quickly via windows explorer. The personal cloud (à la dropbox) application is probably the least important function, followed in order of increasing importance by torrenting, streaming video and storage+backup.



Ideas so far that are, in Sweden, similar wrt cost in terms of $$$:

Samsung NC10 netbook + external drives

Pros:
By far the cheapest (just have to buy hard drives)
Puts it to use (now it's just lying around)
Flexible and versatile
Looks pretty good!

Cons:
Does not handle HD video streaming well wg. with XBMC
Takes up more space than the next alternative



RaspberryPi + external drives

Pros:
Very inexpensive
Most flexible
Very quiet and energy-efficient
Supposedly handles HD video streaming very well
Active and enthusiastic community

Cons:
More of a hassle to set up
Poor I/O performance a problem for file-transfer and torrenting?



Lacie CloudBox, WD My Cloud

Pros:
Simplest, quickest set-up
Attractive design
Fairly good reviews

Cons:
Least flexible
Some disconcerting reviews about annoying noises
Uncertainty about HD streaming performance




Any and all tips and cool ideas very welcome

[ankhtahr]

I'd recommend a Cubietruck. It's similar to the Raspberry Pi, but has Gigabit Ethernet directly from the SoC (the RasPi does 100Mbit Ethernet over its USB, so traffic on the network will brake the USB and vice versa), it has a dualcore ARM, and it has a SATA.

You're extremely flexible with it, it runs Ubuntu or Debian (my recommendation) linux, so you can do everything with it, you could do with a big server. Samba for Windows shares, maybe something like Owncloud for the Dropbox replacement, and so many UPnP/DLNA media streaming servers to choose from. Oh, yeah, and torrenting with a webinterface? No problem.

[Aimless]

I got a reasonable deal on a linkstation 421DE and a 2TB WD Red extremely smooth setup. Only irritating thing right now is I'm not sure I can get the linkstation's torrent app to work with my VPN-service