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Noob at work, hoping to set up


JohnK

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Hullo. 

 

Right. I appear to have acquired an HP Micro N36L with 8 GB Ram and  2 X 1TB WD HDDs and 2 further unoccupied drive caddy's.

 

I'd like advice on the best option to set it up.

 

I plan to use it mainly as a photo archive plus a few MP4 rips of movies and home videos as MP4 and .mob format, all at no more than 1080 resolution, plus a bit of local archiving of instruction manuals and sundry domestic documents (pdf, word docs, Excel spreadsheets etc).

 

I would access from Win10 PCs and Android phones, ideall with no special software, plus a Humax networked TV recorder box and an LG blu ray home cinema.

 

I like the thought of RAID-ing the HDDs and plugging in a USB store once in a while as an off-machine backup, in case one HDD falls over (I'd also rather it told me the HDD had failed, as well). I would hope that in the event if failure I can plug in a new HDD and let the box get on with it.

 

Hopefully I'll be booting off a USB drive (or possibly a SDcard).

 

Management could be a local monitor and keyboard & mouse etc. but remote management from a suitable laptop (Win 10) is a nice sounding idea.

 

What is the current thinking?

 

Thanks all

 

John

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Hello and welcome to the forum.

What you say is doable. First though I would strongly suggest you read the FAQs for you to get acquainted with how all this works. You will most certainly get the answers to 90% of the questions you have. However, I will provide some specifics.

 

14 hours ago, JohnK said:

I plan to use it mainly as a photo archive plus a few MP4 rips of movies and home videos as MP4 and .mob format, all at no more than 1080 resolution, plus a bit of local archiving of instruction manuals and sundry domestic documents (pdf, word docs, Excel spreadsheets etc).

 

I would access from Win10 PCs and Android phones, ideall with no special software, plus a Humax networked TV recorder box and an LG blu ray home cinema.

Yes all good.

 

14 hours ago, JohnK said:

I like the thought of RAID-ing the HDDs and plugging in a USB store once in a while as an off-machine backup, in case one HDD falls over (I'd also rather it told me the HDD had failed, as well). I would hope that in the event if failure I can plug in a new HDD and let the box get on with it.

Yes sounds right. RAID is not a substitute for backups. You need to have a proper backup system in place from the start in case of catastrophic failure. It does happen. Depending what RAID you chose though you might be able to get away with 1 or more drives falling without data loss. Simply replacing the failed drive(s) will work.

 

14 hours ago, JohnK said:

Hopefully I'll be booting off a USB drive (or possibly a SDcard).

Yes SDcard is possible. Note that SD cards are not USB devices thus you will need the VID/PID of the reader when configuring the loader. Read the FAQs and tutorials and you will understand what I mean. You can also read this.

 

14 hours ago, JohnK said:

Management could be a local monitor and keyboard & mouse etc. but remote management from a suitable laptop (Win 10) is a nice sounding idea.

Being a Network Attached Storage device, it is not meant to be directly managed/accessed physically through a monitor and a keyboard. Although (as I recently learnt) it is possible with some gimmickry (installing a host OS and installing DSM as a VM on the same machine) this is not a good approach for general usage unless you do not wish your NAS being accessible in your local network. Even then there are other ways. The only use of this would be for testing but yet again you can do some testing without doing this.

If you wish to go above DSM 6.2 (DSM 6.2.1 / DSM 6.2.2)  then you will need to have an intel NIC otherwise your machine will not show on your network.

 

You should ALWAYS read the DSM Updates Reporting section before making any update to your box.

 

Have fun.

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