Storage, it never fails when considering how big should the storage be, someone ends up making a joking reference to the overall size needing to be extra big for my “collection”. There is no “collection” of any media except my music collection that has been being built since the late 90’s. It’s overall size is about 200GB but the passion to continuously grow it is still alive, therefore accommodating growth could put it at 1TB in 5 years. The pictures of the family and adventures we had been on have been scanned and converted digitally, all of that is only about 100GB and all documents, receipts, emails, whatever I could get my hands on has been converted to a digital format. All these files make up my “important” files which is not even over 1TB but adding in my game library, that is 8TB alone with Steam taking up a good 7TB alone.
The answer to all this and to have a working NAS on the home network is to build my own NAS. Stacking six 8TB SSD’s in RAID 5 would seem to create 64TB but really after the redundancies it comes out to around 42TB. This is still huge and if my total of files equaled 10TB there would still be 32TB left over to play with.
To utilize all this extra storage (32TB), the drives were built into a system that I use to Stream on Twitch that has no GPU and utilizes the integrated CPU’s graphics. It has been an interesting project to have the CPU encode the stream at 1080P and a 6,000 bitrate while hosting in Hyper-V a music server, NAS, AMP the Game Hosting system panel with a Minecraft server to the world and soon a Windows Server for an AD, DNS, CA Controller to the network. Really did not think that an i5-13400 would be able to do all this but even when streaming, playing in Minecraft, listening to music and transferring a world across the internet from the file storage server, there is no lag and the i5 doesn’t even really go over 38%.
Soon, a webpage will be added under Resources and under Garage LAN with all these specifications for everyone to go over. There will also be a section of how to setup a Dual PC for streaming and/or just gaming. This information is great for everyone to pull from and this webpage has become an awesome tool for everyone as well. My hope is that it can continue doing this.