Physical media vs data management

[ItsFlybye]

Ok, so we all know the advantages of having our music and video on 1 drive, a NAS, fluffy cloud, etc.

Ya ever stop to think: Dang. It is so much easier to just stick my discs in a big corner and only use when I need to or copy the most used things and be done vs worrying about your data always being backed up, where it is stored, making sure your hardware is fast enough and not crashing in on itself, keeping those digital backups going, etc.

I'm just here setting up my NAS and am like; Things were a lot easier when I'd just stick my discs in my cabinet after I was done.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I find things are easier with mass storage, but I KINDA miss the novelty of having to insert a VHS tape or DVD to watch a movie. When I would download a movie if I wanted to watch it on the TV I had to either stream it to a blank VHS tape or burn to a DVD when those came out. Man, I feel old.

 

[Exterous]

The trade off was having to locate the right disc and the wait to get the data

 

[sdifox]

I had to build custom shelves cuz otherwise I could not fit my 1200 dvds in the room.

 

[nakedfrog]

I found out about an 80s movie I wanted to check out recently, and the cheapest way to buy it in HD was on HD-DVD. I figured, okay, I'll just rip the HD-DVD when it shows up--my HD-DVD drive would not play nice with it
Ended up dragging out the HD-DVD player for that one movie. Worth it, though.

 

[shortylickens]

No.
I bought a motherboard with 8 SATA plugs and I've got all my movies, music, games, and shows on a collection of 12 and 14 terabyte drives.
There is nothing more convenient than double clicking a file. Except maybe single clicking, which I have to consider now that I've brought it up.

 

[Red Squirrel]

8 sata ports? That's not a NAS, THIS is a NAS:





Actually it looks more impressive than it is, the 4 IBM enclosures are like 400GB and 250GB drives (no longer in my rack) and the other enclosure is around 19TB total.

I wish the IBM enclosures actually let me use normal drives but they have this custom firmware on the drives (they are actually standard Maxtor desktop drives but with IBM sticker and firmware)

 

[snoopy7548]

8 sata ports? That's not a NAS, THIS is a NAS:





Actually it looks more impressive than it is, the 4 IBM enclosures are like 400GB and 250GB drives (no longer in my rack) and the other enclosure is around 19TB total.

I wish the IBM enclosures actually let me use normal drives but they have this custom firmware on the drives (they are actually standard Maxtor desktop drives but with IBM sticker and firmware)

You need to upgrade your drives!

I'm in the process of building a server/NAS (probably going to use unRAID). Found a Supermicro X10SL7-F motherboard, which has 14 SATA ports! I currently have the following drives:

2x 14TB (in HTPC)
1x 8TB (in HTPC)
4x 8TB (used as backups)
2x 6TB (used as backups)

My plan is to move the 14TBs and 8TB from the HTPC to the server, but before that I need to get more drives.

Also picked up a Xeon E3-1231 v3, 32GB of RAM, and a Supermicro CSE-743T-500B case.

I wish I had jumped on the $175 12TB easystores last week...

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yeah most of these drives were bought quite a while back when 3TB or so was biggest drives you could reasonably get. Costs of living were also slightly not as high back then so I had more disposable income. Now I'm at a point where I can't even afford to buy stuff I don't need so have to make what I got last. I'm always tempted to start swapping at least the 1TB drives with bigger ones but it's cheaper to delete stuff.

This storage server had cost a pretty penny when it was built too, case alone was around $1,500, then about $1,500 of components. That's not including drives. the 1TB ones were already in another server so got moved to that server, and rest I bought over the years. I have 2 spare slots actually. Originally it was to grow one of the raid 10 arrays but turns out you can't grow those. Tempted to go raid 6 for next time I redo some arrays, NFS is my real bottleneck so I don't really benefit from the performance boost of raid 10.

 

[IronWing]

We have mostly CDs and FLACs. All CDs are ripped so everything is on the computer and tablet. For playing at home, it’s easier to play the CDs than play off the computer or tablet.

 

[ItsFlybye]

8 sata ports? That's not a NAS, THIS is a NAS:



....

LOLz what on earth is all that wood doing around that thing?

 

[sdifox]

LOLz what on earth is all that wood doing around that thing?

that is his diy rack

 

[ItsFlybye]

that is his diy rack

Sitting on what? His own diy particle board server floor?

 

[sdifox]

We have mostly CDs and FLACs. All CDs are ripped so everything is on the computer and tablet. For playing at home, it’s easier to play the CDs than play off the computer or tablet.

I setup foosbar dlna server and play from tablet. lightweight.

 

[sdifox]

Sitting on what? His own diy particle board server floor?

I don't know why there is fiberboard below the rack.

 

[Kaido]

I find things are easier with mass storage, but I KINDA miss the novelty of having to insert a VHS tape or DVD to watch a movie. When I would download a movie if I wanted to watch it on the TV I had to either stream it to a blank VHS tape or burn to a DVD when those came out. Man, I feel old.

100% agree. I miss MiniDiscs bad sometimes. The cool transparent discs, the techie mechanism to pop it open, the neato-looking device itself...now I just yell at Alexa to play my Spotify lol.

 

[Kaido]

You need to upgrade your drives!

I'm in the process of building a server/NAS (probably going to use unRAID). Found a Supermicro X10SL7-F motherboard, which has 14 SATA ports! I currently have the following drives:

2x 14TB (in HTPC)
1x 8TB (in HTPC)
4x 8TB (used as backups)
2x 6TB (used as backups)

My plan is to move the 14TBs and 8TB from the HTPC to the server, but before that I need to get more drives.

Also picked up a Xeon E3-1231 v3, 32GB of RAM, and a Supermicro CSE-743T-500B case.

I wish I had jumped on the $175 12TB easystores last week...

That's a pretty good deal! I'm always amazed at how quickly technology progresses. I'm popping some 16TB drives into a Synology rackmount case for a customer this week. $9k per box for basically a turnkey 160GB SHA-2 array (special relocatable/expandable/fault-tolerant RAID) with 16 gigs of RAM on the system itself. You literally just unbox it, slide the drives in, and select the software settings you want. It's a far cry from the old days of building Windows storage servers, fixed Dell storage silos, and even my FreeNAS projects. Synology's new SA3600 rig can expand out to over a petabyte:

Synology® Introduces SA3600, High-Performance On-Premises Storage with Petabyte Scalability | Synology Inc.

See all of the latest news from Synology, including new products, software releases, and other announcements.

www.synology.com

Which is bananas, because if you have the budget, you can just buy it off Amazon & have it all delivered free the next day lol. I love being in IT support these days...everything is so much easier & more convenient haha!

 

[Red Squirrel]

LOLz what on earth is all that wood doing around that thing?

Cable management. Not much cables to manage in front, but the back is the same and I have conduits to get to the back if I need to. Way cheaper to DIY than to buy finger ducts, those things are freaking expensive, and not that easy to get. It's basically a 4 post rack in a custom enclosure. Floor is drycore, something clean to walk on. Eventually put actual flooring on top. Whole thing is a work in progress. The concrete floor below is too rough and too dirty to be able to do anything with so I drycored the whole place.

Old pic but shows more of it:



Damn that was in 2013, time flies.