Hi everyone, Was using an HP Microserver with Openmediavault as a server for my files which were played by my Zidoo Z9X through my network. Unfortunately I lost it through a lightning strike. I am wondering if it is worth replacing (the new models are quite expensive) or whether I may as well just go with a USB Hub which I attach some external drives to. Any benefits/detriments to that approach since it doesn't really seem like I need a NAS or Media Server. Thanks!
Local USB drives are fine if you don't mind the boxes and a bit of noise. The content is still accessible on the network through easy Zidoo NAS setup.
I am also in the middle of changing from direct attached USB drives to a NAS solution. I use an Asus Mini PC with Windows 11 as server with the USB enclosure from the Zidoo UHD3000. This works, but sometimes after starting the zidoo the sources are "invalid". One more Zidoo reboot and the sources change to normal state. I have no idea what causes this. Also strange: if i take the HT4 backup and look in the database, i can see every source twice in the Custom_category or Custom_category2 table. And in one of these entries i can see the password for the network user as text. The other entry has **** as password.
Thanks, my drives are pretty silent. Any idea if using a USB hub is fine to connect 2 or 3 external HDDs?
I used a 4 bay enclosure from Icybox ( IB-3805-C31), but the fan was louder than the harddisks. Then i used a 4 bay dockingstation from Startech (sdock4u33) with turned off fans, but i would not recommend this for larger disks. All these enclosures have internal hubs, so there is only one cable to the zidoo.
My old Zidoo X9S had random issue with multiple drives on one USB port. I stopped doing that. One external enclosure works fine per port. Multi bay enclosures work well too. Maybe newer Zidoo's don't have issues with USB hubs. I haven't seen any comments or complaints. If something goes wrong with the hub connection it can corrupt your data.
D Thanks. Does the zidoo see it as one drive or as 4 separate drives? Why do you say you wouldn’t recommend it for larger drives?
Thanks. That would be a concern. Don’t know where to get confirmation on this. Perhaps I could email their support but I don’t think they generally respond?
The Icybox had no problem with larger drives, but the Startech with fan off larger drives are getting to hot. And the Startech fan is really disturbing and not very effective. And it looks like a toaster for harddisks. The Zidoo sees 4 separate drives and there is a switch for every drive. If you eject the drive in mediacenter, then you can switch it off. Mediacenter and HT4 recognize a switched on drive very fast. But HT4 will hide the movies/shows on a switched off drive.
Another option is more of a hybrid, 4 bay device that is a USB3.2 connected NAS/DAS: https://www.qnap.com/en-au/product/tr-004 It give a lot of choices, including Individual (which I use as 4 separate drives), RAID 5 (for redundancy) and for the very game, JBOD (all the disks added together as one big drive, hoping none ever fail). I'm currently running 2x 16Tb and 2x 18Tb Exos drives and they just look like normal network drives on Windows.
That is my beef with Home Theater since day one. I even organized poll here to show that many Zidoo users would like to see this feature. It's easy to implement, the database of the movies is there. They don't have to remove movies from switched off drive. Every other media center app keeps collection of movies all the time except for Zidoo's Home Theater. The best implementation of this feature is in Kodi. It keeps database of all movie all the time. When you rescan your media collection it will detect that the source is disconnected and ask you if you want to delete all the movie from that source. You simple click NO and it's all there. Jellyfin is somehow OK. You need to disable all automatic media updates. The server can be boot up without any drives attached and it will still show full database of all movies. When you add new movie and want to refresh that collection Jellyfin has to have all drives on and active or it will delete the movies that are not available without a warning.
thanks. Maybe to clarify though, I know that NAS options exist just that I don’t specifically need a NAS so was wondering if I could just use drives through a USB hub instead. Another option is the USB function of my router but don’t know how well that performs. I don’t typically use RAID, but a parity type drive might be useful, I recall a software type solution that was kinda like RAID but didn’t have the downside of one drive failing requiring the whole array needing to be rebuilt. (By this I mean the parity drive aspect of RAID, not the part where it writes across drives) I’ll try just using a DAS solution for now and maybe just get a raspberry pi with OMV if I want network connectivity but I believe that won’t even be necessary since the Z9X can just share the attached storage. one of my gripes was that the Z9X couldn’t send WOL (which Kodi on my nvidia shield previously could do) so I with the Z9X I would have to go upstairs to boot my media server manually every time.
Different routers have different performance. Some allow ftp only or web interface and some SMB. Don't expect to play UHD 1:1 rips from router attached hard drives. Could be used for smaller size files. 10 to 20 MB/s is a typical transfer speed from router NAS. OMV OpenMediaVault on Raspberry Pi is painful and overkill for media storage. I started setting it up and the slow process of adding drives and individual directories one at the time, acknowledge and wait, watch the spinning wheel killed it for me. Half way through I aborted, reformatted the MicroSD and installed Kodi OpenElec. Quick and slick. Didn't even bother to setup Kodi or scan libraries. Just shared my local drives through build in SAMBA shares with username and password. Up and running Raspberry Pi SAMBA NAS in minutes Later on I converted this setup to Raspberry Pi 4 Jellyfin server. It took few days to workout the kinks of various drives and network devices around the house. At the end it is a solid low power server for media. It has 8 and 10 TB local USB hard drives attached to RPi plus bunch of other devices around the house including Zidoo attached drives. You could probably find an Android app for WOL and install it on Zidoo but a phone apps are great for that. I use "Awake" small free utility that works great on my iPhone. It wakes up any device on my home network. If I want to wake something up from the outside Internet I do remote session on NVC to my Rasperrry Pi and send wake up pockets to any device. My main router from Internet Provider won't allow WOL packets to be sent through firewall.
Thanks @3DBuff , ah, was just thinking OMV cause that’s what I had in my microserver before lightning killed it. Anyway will give a few things a try once I get my replacement Z9X. I hear you on the router option, and I don’t expect much, but worth a random try. For WoL I hear you, for some reason my microserver wouldn’t wake when using phone apps but worked perfectly fine with Kodi. I just opened Kodi and it automatically woke the server. speaking of which, I was under the impression one could run Kodi on the Z9X (which would then use the built in media player for actual playback)?
Yes, Kodi works great on Zidoo. Install custom version called ZDMC from Zidoo website. WoL has issues in some networks. It's related to main router. If the device is not active for a while the router deletes IP table and cannot send anything to non active IP. You need an app that can broadcast magic pocket WoL to all devices on LAN. "Awake" works great in this case.
Thanks. I’ll try USB hub for now… need to spend the weekend converting the XFS drives to NTFS. Worst case scenario I’ll just share them using my main windows PC but pretty sure USB is all I need. Can use SnapRaid to create a backup parity drive if I really need to.
