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[WeeHappyPixie]

Hi Guys,

Looking for some input and opinions on setting up a new totally silent MediaCenter.

I plan on using a small 60GB SSD for the OS (Win 7 x64 Ultimate). No fans in the system which is based on a Core2 Duo and nVidia GFX card (again no fans).

Anyway, I have in excess of 20TB of media files which I plan on storing on my Windows 2012 Storage Server with server NICS. My LAN is 1GB throughout the house.

Is it best to store these on the server in a shared folder and access it from MC18 via \\Server\Share or via an iSCSI virtual drive. With the iSCSI it would show as a local drive and would be used exclusively with MC18. Not interested in accessing the files directly elsewhere as I will use MC18's DNLA to stream.

What do you guy's recommend, Share or iSCSI as the best solution and performance.

Thanks,

John

[sirkus]

I have a configuration like that. I have tested both with a dedicated (dual) NIC used only for sharing. I don't see any difference in performance between ISCSI and simple sharing in my home environment.

I have choosen simple sharing, because it's simplier to manage. One of the main problem is the backup on the file server. Because the ISCSI is a single and big VHD file, you have to backup the entire file which takes space and days (you can't mount the VHD if it is already mounted in a client OS). Added to that, if your VHD file is corrupted you take the risk to loose all your data.

So, I will say: simple sharing, dedicated NIC, deduplication (50% space saved! Important to backup, because a corrupted file chunk can belong to 1000's of files!).