• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

How to create one huge drive

H

heatrodyne

Junior Member
I have a collection of about 500 dvd movies and growing. I would like to convert to digital form to play on a htpc. I want to have them in a searchable database for easy access. My question is, what is the best way to daisychain say like 8 one terabyte drives with the ability to add more drives later? Should I look into building a server? Can the server appear like a single harddrive on the htpc? Sorry if this is a simple question but I am not very familiar with servers/networking.

Thanks
 
You might want to look at Windows Home Server, it lets you pool mismatched drives for storage

 
yea windows home server is great for pooling lots of drives together in JBOD without having to use a raid controller for it. you can also set it up so that if you have lots of mismatched drives it can sort your data such that there is a copy of each file on at least 2 drives so that if one drive dies everything is redundant. great stuff and from what i hear it isnt hard to set up. havent used it yet myself but i may be looking into it in the near future as im approaching the point where i have a lot of drives that i dont know what to do with
 
That's a pretty serious amount of storage and thus a pretty serious project / problem to solve.


If you want to be in the business of running a file server using cheap commodity PC hardware, I'd set up an OpenSolaris box and set up the first group of roughly size matched drives into a RAIDZ group with one drive redundancy unless you prefer RAIDZ2 for two drives worth of redundancy.

When you go to expand the storage pool you can just add another group of 3 or more drives at once adding a second independent RAIDZ group to the existing overall storage pool. The filesystem you have created / shared will magically be able to expand to use the added capacity in the pool and still appear as one / the same filesystem with no further administration needed.

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/.../zfs/docs/zfs_last.pdf
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-5461
http://opensolaris.org/os/downloads/
http://opensolaris.org/os/downloads/sol_ex_dvd_1/

# Create a RAIDZ of four drives (any three or more will do) and put them in pool StoragePool
zpool create StoragePool raidz c1t0d0 c2t0d0 c3t0d0 c4t0d0

# Create a filesystem in the storage pool
zfs create -o casesensitivity=mixed -o nbmand=on StoragePool/BigFileSystem

# Set the mount point (path to access) the new filesystem
zfs set mountpoint=/export/BigFileSystem StoragePool/BigFileSystem

# Enable NFS and SMB (CIFS i.e. for Microsoft Windows systems to access it ) sharing on the filesystem
zfs set sharenfs=rw StoragePool/BigFileSystem
zfs set sharesmb=on BigFileSystem

# Later on we add four (or any three or more) more drives by creating a new RAIDZ of these new four and adding them to
# the existing storage pool StoragePool. Since the pool's free space just grew, so can the filesystem(s)
# defined to use the pool, so voila you have more space in the pool and the filesystem just stays
# available just as before except with more free space.
zpool add StoragePool raidz c5t0d0 c6t0d0 c7t0d0 c8t0d0


If you'd rather have less administration to do, buy a storage server or good NAS RAID unit and use it.

Personally I wouldn't trust 8+ TB of my data to Windows Home Server.
MAYBE WINDOWS SERVER 2008 with a GOOD hardware RAID card... but unproven / immature and still sort of unstable Windows Home Server? Uh no thanks.

 
Personally I wouldn't trust 8+ TB of my data to Windows Home Server.
MAYBE WINDOWS SERVER 2008 with a GOOD hardware RAID card... but unproven / immature and still sort of unstable Windows Home Server? Uh no thanks.
Click to expand...

WHS is based on 2003 server. The ADS corruption bug was fixed in the recent update, by all accounts its got a good track record with that fix in place.
 
Consider how badly you want a single volume. If it's done in Windows, you'll have to abandon MBR (2 TB limit) partitioning and move to GPT partitioning. GPT isn't supported in 32-bit XP.

If you make the single volume in RAID 5, you'll be stuck with whatever size drive you choose now. If you choose 1 TB drives, you can't add 1.5 TB or 2.0 TB drives later. Well, you can add them, but the RAID 5 array will only use 1 TB on each drive.

There's JBOD (Just a Bunch of Drives), which lets you toss various size drives into a single array. But be sure you understand what happens if a single drive fails. In Windows software RAID, a single drive failure in a JBOD array will cause the loss of ALL data in the array. I don't know what happens with non-software-RAID JBOD arrays. But check it out to be sure.

An alterative to a single large volume is to use multiple volumes and "mount" them inside a main volume. This gives the appearance of a single volume, but let's you maintain each volume separately and easily add additional disks of any size at any time.

Oh, and no matter what type of storage you decide on:
Consider how you are going to do backups. It's going to take a LOT of work to rip all those DVDs and I imagine you only want to do it once. Single drives, RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, JBOD, or whatever else you decide on has a definite chance of losing your data. If it's RAID 0 or RAID 5 or (maybe) JBOD, you can lose it all at once. I'd find a way to back up those files somewhere else.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top