Even if there are many ready-to-go NAS solutions I decided to build myself one and having the HTPC on the same machine. Here is mainly what I wanted:

• low powered system (64-bit microprocessor)
• used as a media server (stream movies/music)
• to be used sometimes as a HTPC, so I wanted HDMI (for HD video)
• ZFS file system with all its goodies
• gigabit ethernet interface to take advantage of the network bandwidth
• nice chassis with four hot-swappable 3.5″ SATA HDD (I am using just two HDD right now because the motherboard has only 3 SATA)

My NAS/HTPC specs are here:

• Chenbro ES34069 chassis
• Zotac ION-ITX-A Wi-Fi Dual Core 1.6GHz motherboard
• 2 GB Kingston DDR2 800MHz RAM
• 2 x Western Digital Caviar Green 1.0 TB
• 1x Toshiba 2.5″ HDD 100 GB (for OS)

I choosed FreeBSD as operating system, because I am more familiar with it than with Solaris. I recompiled mplayer with vdpau support (for HD video).

Here are the steps:

• download the latest mplayer snapshot from their website
• download these two files (ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/vdpau/include/vdpau/) and put them in /usr/include/vdpau (create that directory)
• ./configure –disable-x264-lavc –disable-x264 -–enable-vdpau
• gmake
• gmake install
• check to see if you have vdpau support with: “mplayer -vo help“. If you see something like: “vdpau VDPAU with X11” then everything is ok.

Some additional steps/configs:

• add zfs_enable=”YES” in /etc/rc.conf
• add  the following in /boot/loader.conf:

vm.kmem_size_max=”1024M”

vm.kmem_size=”1024M”

vfs.zfs.arc_max=”100M”

• zpool create storage mirror ad4 ad10
• zfs create storage/archives
• zfs create storage/backups
• install samba, duplicity, rsnapshots, rsync, unison, ushare, …

Right now, everything is working very well, I am very happy with the setup, but I still didn’t manage to have sound over HDMI, so, a temporary solution will be to connect an additional speaker system to it.

I don’t need any fancy remote control, I have a logitech wifi keyboard/mouse, because I like to be able to read the news in the morning (during cofee time) using google reader

The total power consumption is about 35W idle / 45W load which is pretty good, I think.

Thanks Sun …

I will give a try and I will post a few screenshots soon …