# Mac Pro Media Server on a Cat 6 Network



## hakunatata (Aug 20, 2010)

Hello everyone, 

I am thinking about buying a 2.66 quad-core Mac Pro and filling it with 4 2TB drives and using it as my media storage tank (music, pictures, 1080P Movies.) I was hoping to be able to set up a few different areas around the house where I could have access to that media, via my cat 6 network, and use different media players that I already own to play the contect, i.e. Mac Mini, PS3, XBOX 360, or Macbook Pro. Most important though is the mac mini that is hooked up to my denon AV reciever which feeds my projector (EPSON 8500UB.) 

1. Does anyone think there would be a problem streaming 1080P media over a cat 6 network?

2. Does anyone have any suggestions for the best way to raid the drives in the Mac Pro?



Thank you in advance and if there are any other problems you guys can see with this set-up, please let me know. 

fyi - the reason I am opting for the quad-core mac pro over a NAS or multi drive-bay enclosure is because I am able to get the computer at a discounted rate which would make it around the same price as one of those other options. so I figured why not have a nice computer as well. thanks.

Dave


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## eugovector (Sep 4, 2006)

If the price is right, go for it. I'd definitely want to double check my other options to make sure that I wasn't paying for power and electricity usage that I wouldn't really benefit from.

1) No, not even close.
2) Not familiar with macs, but I'd RAID 5 if possible.


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## hakunatata (Aug 20, 2010)

Will there be that much of a power usage difference between a mac pro and a 4 bay NAS with its own separate processor? I have been looking at some different NAS solutions out there, they seem to get expensive pretty fast. using a computer instead seems like a good solution.


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## hakunatata (Aug 20, 2010)

Lets say I put 4X2tb hard drives in my mac pro. would it be better to just raid all four drives together, or just raid three of them of have the one left over for the OS and other data. Any thoughts? Thank you in advance for the help.


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## Goldenbear (Oct 20, 2009)

hakunatata said:


> Lets say I put 4X2tb hard drives in my mac pro. would it be better to just raid all four drives together, or just raid three of them of have the one left over for the OS and other data. Any thoughts? Thank you in advance for the help.


I'd recommend leaving one drive for the OS and using the rest for raid. However, with only 3 drives, your most logical option is probably raid 5, which will get you roughly 4TB max (assuming 2TB drives). May be better to boot the Mac off an external drive, reserving the internal drives for raid.

I've been researching NAS boxes pretty heavily and like them more and more. QNAP has great hardware, but their customer support seems non-existent. Synology seems to have excellent support (not a fan of their hardware, though), and the gui looks very user-friendly. It actually looks very similar to OS X in a lot of ways. Wonder if Apple will be calling them? :innocent:

Anyway, for a NAS, I'd recommend the fastest processor you can afford. Raid is nice, but if you've got an under-powered processor, it'll take you DAYS to rebuild. If another drive goes bad during that time, you've just lost everything. Everyone recommends using the same drives, but that means more likely that your drives all come from the same manufacturing lot. If there's a lot defect, your drives could fail at a similar time frame. That brings up my last point... BACKUP!

Raid gives you redundancy in case of drive failure, but it isn't a backup. Get an external raid enclosure and schedule regular backups. The QNAP and Synology NAS boxes I looked at have this feature.

If you want to go with the Mac Pro, I'd recommend getting an external raid box, connected via eSATA. The eSATA boxes aren't too expensive, compared to Firewire options. Faster too. Just keep in mind that, even without an external raid box, the Mac will definitely use more power than a NAS.

Btw, nothing wrong at all with using the Mac for this purpose. The NAS boxes are simply slower computers running linux. The Mac should be able to handle everything without breaking a sweat. You just have to figure out what software you'll be using to serve the data, unless you're simply using it as a network hard drive.


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## hakunatata (Aug 20, 2010)

Thank you so much for all the helpful information. So I purchased the mac pro, I am pretty excited about it, I still have it at the office and have not brought it home yet, per the wife, I have to sell my existing G5 before I can bring it home. Here are the specs of the new computer: 

The Mac Pro 
- 2.66 GHz Quad Core 45-nm Xeon W3520 (Nehalem) processor with a dedicated 256k of level 2 cache for each core and 8 MB of "fully shared" level 3 cache.
- 6 GB of 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM
- 640 GB (7200 RPM, 16 MB cache) 3Gb/s Serial ATA hard drive
- 18X dual-layer "SuperDrive" and an NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 with 512 MB of GDDR3 memory. 
- Ports include five USB 2.0 ports, four Firewire "800" ports, dual Gigabit Ethernet, and both a Mini DisplayPort and a dual-link DVI port

I was able to get it used for $1000 from a friend. So I am going to follow your advice and pick up an ESATA Nas and use that to back up the 6TB's in the mac. If I am going to be doing a full backup, is it necessary to raid the 3X2TB of drives in the mac pro, or should I skip that so I can have 2 more TB's of space for media? 

I also have a lot of old LifeMovies DVD's that I made when I was in the wedding video and personal documentaries business. I was hoping to be able to back those up but not have each one be 4.37 gigs. I have exported a lot using handbreak, compressor, and MPEG stream clip. But I have not been too happy with the quality and file size of the files I am getting. Does anyone have any suggestions of a software or settings for software that might work well. I was hoping to not lose any quality but be able to get them down to 2 gigs or so. Does anyone think that is possible, or do you think I just have to stick with the Video_TS folders? And what file type do you think is the best to go with as far and longevity and variety of apps that can play it. I have also heard makemkv is a useful app for that purpose. 

Thank you in advance, hope everyone is doing well.


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## Goldenbear (Oct 20, 2009)

hakunatata said:


> ...So I am going to follow your advice and pick up an ESATA Nas and use that to back up the 6TB's in the mac. If I am going to be doing a full backup, is it necessary to raid the 3X2TB of drives in the mac pro, or should I skip that so I can have 2 more TB's of space for media?


If the raid box is only for backing up the Mac, it doesn't need to be a NAS box.

As I've been looking into this, it looks like you have some problems that requires some decisions to be made.

Mainly, Apple's Disk Utility does not offer Raid 5 (Only Raid 0 and 1), and I haven't found any Raid software for OS X that does Raid 5. I presume there are Unix options that you could run from the command line, but I have not yet found anything that's OS X native.

This means that in order to run your internal drives with Raid 5, you'll need a Raid card. My limited research shows it'll cost $200 and up. Here are a few links:
http://www.barefeats.com/hard120.html
http://eshop.macsales.com/search/highpoint
http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&product_id=189

You should also consider that USB 3.0 is actually starting to ship now, and theoretically, it's faster than esata. I expect we'll see raid boxes using USB 3.0 before the end of the year, which may be worth waiting for. However, unless you find a software Raid option, you'll still have to pay for a more expensive enclosure that includes hardware Raid. This is the least expensive Firewire hardware Raid 5 box I've found so far. A USB 3 version should be closer to $200, whenever it ships.

So here's a suggestion:

1) Put qty 2 drives in the Mac (2TB or wait for the bare 3TB drives to ship). Stripe them (Raid 0) with Disk Utility and put your media on there (this gives you either 4TB or 6TB, but if one drive dies, you lose everything).

2a) Now, assuming you don't really fill up the entire 4T (or 6TB), you could put 2 more of the same size drives in the Mac, using 1 of them as the boot drive. Then, back up your movies onto these two drives. Since these are separate volumes, you'll need to figure out how to divide the files between them. It's a hassle, and I don't recommend it, unless you want to save money.

2b) Better option is to just get an external 2-drive enclosure. Stripe those drives using Disk Utility (or get one that has Raid 1 built-in - they're cheap, but get a good one or else you'll spend days rebuilding if a drive dies) and back up your internal movie files onto the external enclosure.

2c) Even better option is to get a 4-drive enclosure that does Raid 5 (like the one from OWC) and back up your internal files onto that one. The advantage here is that option 2b is a striped drive, which means if one drive fails, you lose everything. 2c has additional redundancy so that you can lose 1 drive and still have your data. If you use 4 drives, you can keep 1 as a spare, in which case you can lose 2 drives and still have your data.

A few other thoughts:

a) For the backup, since you're running Raid 0 on the main drives, you'll want to back up frequently enough to capture any changes you make to the files.

b) If you want to use esata or USB 3.0, you'll need to buy a PCI-express card. Some of the esata raid enclosure come with a card, but I'm not sure if they have drives for OS X.

c) FW800 is actually pretty fast and may be all you really need for what you want to do. However, esata and USB 3.0 is less expensive AND FASTER.

Hope this makes sense.



> ...I also have a lot of old LifeMovies DVD's that I made when I was in the wedding video and personal documentaries business. I was hoping to be able to back those up but not have each one be 4.37 gigs. I have exported a lot using handbreak, compressor, and MPEG stream clip. But I have not been too happy with the quality and file size of the files I am getting. Does anyone have any suggestions of a software or settings for software that might work well. I was hoping to not lose any quality but be able to get them down to 2 gigs or so. Does anyone think that is possible, or do you think I just have to stick with the Video_TS folders? And what file type do you think is the best to go with as far and longevity and variety of apps that can play it. I have also heard makemkv is a useful app for that purpose.
> 
> Thank you in advance, hope everyone is doing well.


Are each of your DVDs actually 4.3GB in size? If they're really that large, you're not going to compress them to 2GB without losing a lot of detail.


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## thegrinchd (May 28, 2012)

I would look into a raid 5 card for the mac pro.

I have system I built using a g5 and Xserve software to serve movies, music and provide us with home data storage.

I would not recommend using the OS based RAID, there is a fairly serious performance hit. 

I am running 5x 1TB drives + 1 hot spare on a PCI-X RocketRaid 8 slot SATA card (all inherited from work but the drives) I have built an enclosure and it has 8 total drives in it. 6 dedicated to the array and two spanned for other junk.

If you do ANYTHING with striping without parity you are GREATLY increasing the risks of data loss, be aware of that. The logic is this: If you have one drive there is a (nonsense number) 10% chance of that drive failing, If you stripe three of these together without parity (ie RAID5) you have now more then tripled the likelihood of failure, because any one drive failure is going to destroy your array's data, in an unrecoverable way.

If you have 4 drives, the safest way to deal with them from a data perspective is 4 volumes (barring RAID 5) you could mirror the drives but the cost in drives is very high in that configuration (active not passive mirroring, IE the data is written to both volumes at once by the bus, not you copying)

The cost on that kind of redundancy is so high you could probably find a raid card for less then doubling your storage.

As to your point about the NAS vs Server. I have found the power consumption of the G5 Xserve + 8 drives is an issue. I would much prefer a 5 drive NAS system swapout to my server now. This was punishingly expensive (+$1500) when I built this system, but can be purchased from (I believe) LaCie for less then $400 with no drives now. (a NAS is also easier to administer then a server OS)

I would do the following presuming you have have the macpro in place at this point:

I would offline it, and use it as your playback device in the livingroom or whatever, and use the mini (with OSX Server perhaps) and an external array of some sort to serve your data, you have a HUGE amount of horsepower available in a Mac Pro to use it to serve data in a house network (it is, in short, swatting a fly with a bulldozer). You could use your G5 as a server with no problem (I have been for years) and the G5 given proper hardware (drives raid etc) can push close to 2GB of data a minute across my gigabit cat5 wired network.

Your mac pro will be more leveraged decoding video, you can perhaps swap the video card to allow HDMI direct connect, and it has analog and digital audio out etc.

I have been using a Macbook pro 2.33 c2d and have been having some problems with decoding .mkv containered files, the Mac Pro when put in place (even with 2gb of ram) laughs at those files.

*HTPC*
MacPro 1,1
Dual Core 2x2.66 Xeon
500gb rotational 7200 Rpm Sata drive 
2x 8x DVD-R
2gb (upgrading to 6 or 10 momentarily)
OS X 10.6.8

*G5 Server* (if interested)
G5 Dual 2.0Ghz
160gb OS drive
10.4 OS X Server 
RocketRaid (I think it is a 1608) 8 Port Sata Raid5 host (a web based tool is used to configure the array(s)
5GB Ram

All wired together with a Netgear 24port gigE backbone, going to a wireless N +gigE router in the LR

In short, ditch the Mac Pro as server, it is WAY to much machine to set in a closet. 

You could build a Linux box out of a Pentium that can serve data. (probably close to equally well) Servers need horsepower to serve application data or multiple (10-50 etc) users, a home situation is rarely in that situation.

We use ours as a data repository with redundancy and media library, the G5 is probably nearly 8 years old at this point, and the OS is probably 3 or 4, and aside from maybe getting bigger drives at some point I don't see decommissioning it, until it physically stops working. Serving files is easy peasy for any computer from probably the last 10 years. (particularly for low use environments like a home network)

My X Serve could probably handle file serving for an office of 10 or 20 without problem, let alone movie night.

Your mileage may vary of course.


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## Tim Reed (May 16, 2012)

hakunatata said:


> Hello everyone,
> 
> I am thinking about buying a 2.66 quad-core Mac Pro and filling it with 4 2TB drives and using it as my media storage tank (music, pictures, 1080P Movies.) I was hoping to be able to set up a few different areas around the house where I could have access to that media, via my cat 6 network, and use different media players that I already own to play the contect, i.e. Mac Mini, PS3, XBOX 360, or Macbook Pro. Most important though is the mac mini that is hooked up to my denon AV reciever which feeds my projector (EPSON 8500UB.)
> 
> ...





Hi there, have you ever heard of Plex? www.plexapp.com
Plex finds all the metadata for all your media then puts it into a wonderful interface. You could install Plex Server on the Mac Pro and it will be able to send/stream to all the media devices you listed, even simultaneously! Ps3/360 will be able to see the server on your local network via DLNA and UpNP and for the mini and mbp you just need to install the Plex client. With the Plex Client it will give you a beautiful interface were you can see your movies, tv shows, pictures and music. Since you have the mini connected to a projector the interface will look so much better. And you can even download "channels" within the interface that support stuff like netflix and hulu.

I currently use a mini connected to my HDTV with my mbp running as the server with DAS.

I highly recommend this software, its free and has a very active forum.


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## Sevenfeet (Feb 2, 2009)

I'm curious to how this turned out. The Mac Pro is a beast of a machine and I cannot imagine that it couldn't do the job as described here. Even the G5 tower probably could have done it. The big deal about this is the ability for the computer to saturate the pipe, meaning in this case wired Ethernet. For perspective, I was doing the same thing with a 2009 Mac Mini and a Drobo Series 2...neither of which are speed demons. The big thing the Mac Pro delivers is a multi-core transcoding machine and handbrake engine. I stream my movies to iOS devices and doing transcoding is a CPU intensive problem. Honestly the Mac Mini just couldn't do the job once you got better than SD video. I've since put an old Dell Poweredge 2800 server into service running Windows 2008 R2 and although its six years old, 4 Xeon cores is now the fastest machine I own and a much better transcoding machine (the Mac Pro with Nehalem processors in this example will still kick its butt).


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