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Showing posts from January, 2016

My setup for downloading & streaming movies and tv

I recently signed up for Netflix and am retiring my headless home media pc. This blog will have to serve as its obituary. The box spent about half of its life running FreeNAS , and half running Archlinux . I’ll briefly talk about my experience with FreeNAS, the migration, and then I’ll get to the robust setup I ended up with. The machine itself cost around $1000 in 2014. Powered by an AMD A4-7300 3.8GHz cpu with 8GB of memory. A SilverStone DS380 case is both functional, quiet and looks great. The hard drives have been updated over the last two years until it had a full compliment of 6  WD Green 4TiB drives - all spinning bits of metal though. Initially I had the BSD based FreeNAS operating system installed. I had a single hard drive in its own ZFS pool for TV and Movies, and a second ZFS pool comprised of 5 hard drives for documents and photos. FreeNAS is straight forward to use and setup, provided you only want to do things supported out of the box or by plugins. Each plugi