Movie Storage Project, need ideas...

[ataylor23]

Im toying with the idea of moving all my movies to HD. Size wise I will be converting all Media to 700MB size vs DVD that I have now. Yes I will lose quality but right now Im fighting scratch disks or even perfectly fine disks that skip (guessing due to age of the DVD's) Seems Media Centers are becoming more and more prevalent so this would be attached to mine.

Im looking to move my Movies to a hard drive library. Seems GB costs have gone down. I have roughly 400ish movies now and Im leaning towards a 1TB mirror setup.

Using
Rosewill R2-JBOD Aluminum 3.5" USB 2.0 DUAL-BAY External Enclosur

2X
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

Debating on this idea or even an internal storage setup. The point would be to mirror two 1TB drives to each other.

Thoughts, ideas beyond this...

-Drew

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: ataylor23
Thoughts, ideas beyond this...

Yeah, stop scratching your disks. I own roughly 1,000 disks total, and not one of them has a scratch, small or large.

 

[RebateMonger]

Rather than mirror the drives, I'd recommend using single (non-mirrored) drives and using the second drives for making independent backups. The primary purpose of a redundant RAID array is for uptime, which isn't a problem in this particular case. But losing the DVD rips IS a problem, since it's so much work to make them.

If you buy, for instance, two 1 TB drives, make your rips to the first 1 TB drive. Then make backups of the files to the second 1 TB drive. Update these backups periodically (as you add more rips.

When not updating, keep the second 1 TB drive as far away as practical for you. You can use external drive housings for this (USB or eSATA), or you might try one of the new drive docks that lets you insert a bare SATA drive into the dock vertically, with no drive housing required.

This way, you have three independent copies of your movies: The original DVD, the rip, and the backup rip. If you do a mirror instead, and if something goes wrong (a power surge on your server, for instance, or file corruption) you may lose BOTH of your drives if they are mirrored. And you'll lose all your rips. With separate, disconnected backup drives, it'll be much harder to lose your rips.

 

[sgrinavi]

OP,

Do you really need a backup movies? why are you willing to give up all that fidelity? I would use the extra TB of space to keep my movies in their original, full, glory....

Also, is your collection static? are you willing to settle for a 1 or, possiblty, 2TB box? will you be tossing it later for a new solution or are you willing to trash some of your movies at some point?

Originally posted by: myocardia

Yeah, stop scratching your disks. I own roughly 1,000 disks total, and not one of them has a scratch, small or large.

Very Helpful, that's a great way to keep new members comming back.

 

[SolMiester]

How about 1 of these SATA encloses fill it up as required......

 

[Viper GTS]

I would really think twice about re-encoding them.

The hardware necessary to store 400 DVD's worth of ISOs is a small cost compared to the time & effort you are going to spend ripping (much less encoding). Spend the extra money and do it in a lossless format. Otherwise at some point in the near future when storage is even cheaper you're going to be kicking yourself for wasting all those days of effort.

Same goes for music - MP3's are great for portability but archiving in any lossy format is just stupid.

Viper GTS

 

[nyker96]

Another method I have been using for large storage is NAS solution. I have a FreeNAS based box that's very light weight machine: Sempy 2800+ 754//Tforce 6100//Rosewill 4 SATA controller//up to 6 SATA drives (2 so far)//a standard ATX box with 6 drive bays. Running FreeNAS OS. no monitor/keyboard needed, headless operations. So far it has about 1TB of storage. hooked up to my home network via ethernet. I'm planning on another 4 drives next year to bring it to about 3TB total. I also added more 80mm//120mm fans into the case for extra cooling. From the outside I set it up to act like WinXP network neighborhood. The freenas OS allows it to be setup like another winxp or linux machines etc. very flexible multiple protocol available to serve up your data. So all my winxp machines just sees it like another win xp machine. My Linux box can mount it and access it as well.

You can look into the NAS route, very flexible. My SATA controller in the box allows RAID0/1/5 I believe. However I don't need RAID right now but have the option to do so as well.

 

[mosprovider]

Thanks everyone. I appreciate all the great responses, even the DONT SCRATCH THE DVD's. lol
I have a son that just likes to grab them and use them as throwing devices.

Anyway, I will do some research and see what I feel is best. So far I like both the SATA and NAS solutions. Leaning towards the NAS considering I have a PC doing nothing sitting in the corner all lonely. Need to look in to the connection of multiple drives to the mobo tho cause Im sure I couldnt connect 3 or 4 drives at this point. Im guessing thats where a RAID card would come in.

-V

 

[QueBert]

Originally posted by: SolMiester
How about 1 of these SATA encloses fill it up as required......

that's a pretty good price, I'm in the same boat as the OP, it's not exactly stylish to fit in with the HTPC I'm building but I could put it somewhere hidden. Best price by far I've seen on something that holds 4 HD's. I might have to order this thanks for the link

And OP good luck on this project it sounds a lot like mine, except I'm also ripping a ton of music CD's to FLAC, I think I'ma need about 4tb's of space to get everything of mine over. We both have a lot of work cut out for us

 

[aigomorla]

hehe...

Well im suprised FMC didnt reply yet.

I built a dedicated computer and just addon drives as needed when space becomes required.

I realized this is the far simplist and easiest solution for what i do. Also having another computer to handle decoding and ripping, while your main is doing what you need to do is very convenient.

Anyhow ive been upgrading my NAS slowly and steadly and it started out as a P4 3.2, then kept upgrading when i retired that platform.

Now i have 2 one is loaded with 6 x 1TB SATA + 750 IDE which is partitioned 50gig windows and 700gigs data. (Natsuki)

The other is loaded with 4 x 500gig + 1 750gig IDE partitioned out the same way. I wanted to maximize drive space without addition of controller card. (Sammy)


But i would just piece out a super cheap low wattage system and build a computer you can toss in a corner with pcanywhere or some form of remote on a gigabit network. This is truely the best scalable solution i saw.


uhh Natsuki just happened to grow uncontrolably, dont ask me how, i woke up and she started walking in the 4ghz quadcore territory with the rest of my other rigs. :X

 

[QueBert]

aigomorla good post, I might re-think my standalone NAS thing and just go with a dedicated low end PC, maybe a p180 mini which is nice looking and has plenty of room for HD's. Looking on Newegg Seagate has a 1.5TB drive, the price isn't bad - $190

1.5tb x 4 drives would be godly

 

[mosprovider]

Can someone explain the method/card need to connect multiple HD's up via Sata to a Mobo that doesn't have enough connections? I am looking for decent speed as well. Not sure how this is done exactly. I would like to have the ability to use raid if needed but have both options.

Maybe a great way to circumvent having to buy another enclosure as has been mentioned above.

 

[aigomorla]

Originally posted by: ataylor20
Can someone explain the method/card need to connect multiple HD's up via Sata to a Mobo that doesn't have enough connections? I am looking for decent speed as well. Not sure how this is done exactly. I would like to have the ability to use raid if needed but have both options.

Maybe a great way to circumvent having to buy another enclosure as has been mentioned above.

well first off unless its raid5 or mirror raid, you dont want to raid on a storage drive.

1 drive fails, your storage goes bye bye.

About adding more sata ports to your computer:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16816150022

thats an example of a cheap controller card. You can buy one with raid onboard, and the price climbs exponetally.

I have an ARC-1680ix that costed around 800 dollars. :T