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General questions


leonacn

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Hi everyone in here, I am brand new to the XPEnology project and just have some questions that i'm confused about, so hope anyone can help :smile:...

My questions is:

1. If i'm building my own HTPC machine with some new Intel CPU and graphic cards, am i then able to install XPEnology on this machine YES/NO ?

2. Under "Releases" in the forum, i see some versions like "DS3612xs DSM 4.3 build 3810++ (repack v1.0)" ...but is it not possible to install the latest 5.0 or later software? or should you only install this 4.3 build 3810++ version first and then upgrade in DSM like normal or what?..Please explain me :smile:

3. there are different kind of images or something called gnoboot and Nanoboot...what is this and the difference??

 

I really hope someone kind person could help me with these questions...sorry if i sound stupid here, but we all have to start somewhere wright? :smile:

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Chers mate,

My suggestion is to spend wisely 30min of your time on reading some posts on this forum. Imagine that nobody reads the posts some guys sadly worked on to rise this community.

shortly said, don't take me wrong but having this project for free, please at least read the "manual" :smile:. Everything is documented

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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Hi everyone in here, I am brand new to the XPEnology project and just have some questions that i'm confused about, so hope anyone can help :smile:...

Welcome aboard!

My questions is:

1. If i'm building my own HTPC machine with some new Intel CPU and graphic cards, am i then able to install XPEnology on this machine YES/NO ?

NO

we all have to start somewhere wright? :smile:

(W)Right! :smile:

Reading up numerous answers to the same questions is the excellent place to start.

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Yep, been there, done that, I meant I was very confused at first but thought just try it, if it works, good, if not, use the system for htpc... thus I answered someone that had similar question, so check this post:

 

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3608#p21719

 

Edit: Also note that Xpenology based on DSM version that doesn't have direct HDMI output so you have to live with that if you like to experiment

 

Have fun :wink:

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Cheers mate! If you have other questions just ask. If you need clarifications from others that performed a special task, ask.

I'm suggesting to start with a small test on old hardware and see if it fits your needs

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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Hey you guys from this post...after my first intensive look in many of the postings from the section "Guides/How-to"...i have learned quite some now :grin: But after all, i still have a few questions left and thats all before i will build/install my own XPEnology machine.

 

question1: It seems fairly easy to find which Motherboards and NIC's that is supported when installing XPEnology, but which processor type can/cannot be used in such build..2 or 4 cores?? I would like to go for a Intel Haswell processor, but since i'm buying all component for my Real Physical Machine from brand NEW...then it would be great to know so i don't burn of any stupid money in this case!

 

question2: How many GB of RAM is supported by Synology's software/DSM? some in here writes 4GB, others 6GB and some again 8GB ??

 

Thanks a lot in advance for any help!! - Leonacn

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Hi again mate,

DSM is not power hungry at all. Most of us are running our XPEno boxes on low-power dual-core CPU's like Atom. Some like to add more power to their machines just to use the transcoding feature as good as possible. I personally don't use Plex that much. I use DLNA a lot.

I am using an ASRock Q1900-ITX because it can host up to 6x SATA ports, has an embedded low-power 10w TDP, quad-core, x86, passive-cooling CPU.

Normally, you wouldn't need an i7 or i3 unless you're doing transcoding for plex but even though, transcoding will work on a less powerful CPU just that the task will take a bit longer.

DSM is working with 512MB RAM and will work pretty good for normal usage, without any databases or memory intense applications. Most of the users are adding 2 to 4GB of RAM to their boxess mainly because of... commodity :smile:

Here are 2 screenshots of my system usage when doing a rsync backup to my 2nd NAS

http://i.imgur.com/lHX4vCA.png

http://i.imgur.com/yEKQ6m0.png

 

I have 16GB of RAM because i want to switch from a bare-metal installation to ESX but didn't managed to get the time :-/

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@schnapps...thanks alot for the extra info...i now have got myself a test machine (bare-metal) HP industry desktop, and i will just try install XPEnology on this machine before doing any big stunts :grin: again thanks for your help...its nice to get support from others that have already "been there" :smile:

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I was in your position a year ago, looking around for a htpc/nas/esxi server. To answer your first question it is very much doable but adds to the complexity. Here's how I had it in the past:

 

CPU: AMD FX8350

RAM: 32 GB GSkill DDR3 running at 1866

MB: Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3

 

The good thing about the above is that it supports direct i/o allowing you to allocate hardware to different vm's and everything works out of the box with esxi 5.1. The way I had it configured was:

 

Installed and boot esxi off a USB

2 Sata ports dedicated to the ESXi host 1 for using as a main boot drive and 2nd for CD\DVD boot drive. My NAS image also boots off of here as well as vcenter.

4 Sata ports forwarded to Xpenology so that it sees them directly, no need to mess about with RDM's and SMART works along with drive temps :smile:

 

2x PCIE graphics cards

1x assigned to the esxi host (cheap pcie ith hdmi also going to the TV)

1x assigned to my htpc VM with the NVIDIA PCIE graphics card assigned to it along with the USB3 ports where I plugged in the infrared receiver and bluetooth dongle. When you boot the VM you won't get a display on the TV screen until it has fully booted into Linux\Windows but that's normal.

 

I assigned 2x cpu cores and 4 GB RAM to XPenology only because I use plex and crashplan amongst other packages (easy way to back up VM's using NFS).

 

Hope that should be enough to get you going.

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