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Data Storage Media

Do You Need More Space for Your Media Needs? 105

Posted by Cliff from the fulfilling-the-endless-need-for-more-free-bytes dept.
ewanrg asks: "I have about 1/2 Terabyte of storage on my couple of home systems, and it's filling up rapidly with captured Home Videos and shows recorded off my TiVO. I'm thinking that if I want to get through the next season of TV and the Holiday season at home I need to add at least a Terabyte of storage. My first thought was to use DVD-R (since I have a burner). However, if you assume that you use about 4.4 Gigs (in real terms) per DVD-R, then you'd need 230 DV-Rs to hold about a terabyte of data. Inconvenient if you're trying to find which of 10 DVDs you put that episode of Futurama on - particularly if you recorded them as they came (over a few years) rather than wait until you could get them every night on Cartoon Network. I've also looked at the various NAS devices out there, but $8-$20K seems a bit much. What I'd really like would be an inexpensive drive or array I could hook up to my PC which has a S-Video out port. I could then use all sorts of Media Library programs to find a file and play it. Can folks suggest something big and reasonably fast with an affordable prosumer price tag?"
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Do You Need More Space for Your Media Needs? More

Do You Need More Space for Your Media Needs?

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  • Hm. 2 minutes of google searching turned up this http://www.gvstore.com/no4u12atadrb.html I know that I've seen similar devices at lower price tags. For this one, you can have a TB of raid space for $5000. I'm not going to do the searching for you, but I know that I've priced double that space for about $4500 somewhere. ATA in raid-5 is a good way to go.

  • ATA RAID-5 and MythTV (Score:2, Informative)

    by Peterl ( 39350 )
    Set up a linux/BSD box with a software RAID 5 array configured to hold as much as you'd like. Share that volume out with SMB/NFS. Run a MythTV.org box (combined or separate frontend/backend) to record/play the shows.

  • Well it all depends. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @06:45PM (#7038566) Journal
    I have gone the cheapo method.

    A dual P3 (second hand) fitted with cheap promise ata cards. Let linux combine them into raids and you got pretty cheap storage for home use. Sure the speed is not going to win any benchmarks but for home use who cares?

    Only problem is that you can have a max of 3 promise cards. So that limits you to 16 discs.

    Of course if you are an american you can now get pretty cheap 200gig drives. So that gives you a lot of storage even with raid5.

  • hehe (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @06:48PM (#7038588)
    Quit pretending. Just admit that it's PORN you need all that space for.
  • My suggestion: watch less TV.

    If you don't have time to watch it within the first week, are you ever really going to watch it? I think you're trying to create the modern equivalent of the "dusty box of old videotapes that I meant to watch one day".

    • Re:Maybe the problem isn't storage space.... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @06:54PM (#7038630) Homepage Journal
      "If you don't have time to watch it within the first week, are you ever really going to watch it?"

      Obviously you've never done the "oo I got a day off" M*A*S*H marathon.

      I hate problems like this. The guy wants a problem solved, not a reason not to solve it. If he wants to build a library, let him do it. Frankly, I wish this technology had been around a few years ago. Shows come and go. It's damn near impossible to find the majority of Mystery Science Theater episodes that aired on Comedy Central. That's why the Digital Archive Project is up and running. They don't want that show to die just because Comedy Central wouldn't renew it.

    • Maybe you should get a life (Score:4, Insightful)

      by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @07:08PM (#7038739) Homepage Journal
      So a guy collects stuff you consider useless. So what? I own too many books, I know an otherwise sane lady who owns way too many shoes. Maybe we all need to cut back, but I don't think any of us are ignorant of that possibility.

      If we start a conversation based on "how do I organize all my crap", butting in with a lecture on the crappiness of crap is arrogant and offtopic.

      I'm assuming, of course, that you don't have any little vices that you prefer to cope with rather than simply get rid of. Or am I mistaken?

    • "My suggestion: watch less TV."

      This is 'informative'? Exactly how is this comment helpful? He's basically saying "you can solve the problem by losing interest in it." Glad he's not my doctor.
    • Although that is a growing problem, I still don't think that it will fix it.

      I think that thr problem is that he should delete some stuff. I too am in the habit of saving masses of 'crap' and no deleting it, even when I never watch it again. It takes and hard drive to fail before I ever erase somthing (and that happens surprisingly often for some reason).
      I have mountains of saved video, but I hardly ever watch it again, I just accumulate it (that's why I just bought an array of hard-drives - to store this s

  • The upper limit (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by Otter ( 3800 )
    When you have more hours of archived video than you have hours left in a realistic estimate of your lifespan, it's time to start wrapping things up.

    And at the rate you're going, I envision you on your deathbed watching Sixteen Candles from its Oxygen broadcast in May of 2005. Your grandchildren will be asking you what a floppy disk is.

  • Build your own (Score:4, Informative)

    by Tyrdium ( 670229 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @06:53PM (#7038618) Homepage
    Pricewatch lists 160 gig drives as costing about $100. Assuming they cost $125 (including shipping, and not from the lowest priced place), 7 drives, giving you 1120 gigs of storage space, would cost you $875. Add in some decent hardware for a file server, and you're looking at $1250-$1500. Compared to prices for NAS drives, etc., this would probably be your most economical option, not to mention the most versatile (you could also use it as a web server, etc.). Heck, stick in a decent PCI TV tuner and you've got an uber-TiVo!

    • That's about what I did: get some IDE disks (4 in my case), get a drive cage [proware.com.tw] capable of keeping those cool ) and hot-plugable, use a RAID-5 IDE controller [lsilogic.com] and I had, with 120GB disks, 360GB space. Not extremly fast, but convenient. That box is my main server keeping all home directories, including lots of (Divx re-encoded) recorded movies/shows.

      Nowawadays I would skip the RAID controller as it's potentially the single-point-of-failure in my setup. And instead of 120GB disks, I would choose larger ones.

      • Nowawadays I would skip the RAID controller as it's potentially the single-point-of-failure in my setup.

        Soooo... Instead of a single point of failure, you would want to have four single point of failure ? Makes tons of sense, of course.

        • Re:Build your own (Score:3, Informative)

          by hbackert ( 45117 )

          you would want to have four single point of failure

          Hu? What I ment was: I've got 1 RAID controller doing some magic to create a RAID-5 out of 4 disks. If a disk fails, no issue. Gets replaced. No data loss. No downtime. Easy to understand, yes?

          Now if the controller fails, I've got 4 disks full of data and no (simple) way of getting the data back off. (Yes it's possible, but dou you know how AMI/LSI store their RAID-5 data on 4 disks?) I'd have to buy another controller of the same brand (which is not a

          • I have a HighPoint 404 in my server at home. It has two RAID-1 arrays on it. The second array was an emergency backup for the first which has had problems. Personally I really question the HighPoint driver. It honestly makes me wish I'd gone with software RAID. It was considerably cheaper than the 3ware card but I also believe I got what I paid for. I would encourage anyone thinking about doing this to first give software RAID a try. If it doesn't perform to their expectations (and assuming they were

    • Re:Build your own (Score:3, Informative)

      by Electrum ( 94638 )
      Pricewatch lists 160 gig drives as costing about $100. Assuming they cost $125 (including shipping, and not from the lowest priced place), 7 drives, giving you 1120 gigs of storage space, would cost you $875.

      You will also need a good RAID controller. 3ware makes the best IDE RAID controllers. An Escalade 7506-8 [3ware.com] would be good here.

      • I had a conversation in #debian on freenode about this very issue the other night.

        I forgot who I was talking to, but he made a very good point about software raid controllers vs hardware raid controllers:

        Before you shell out money on hardware RAID, try setting it up in software and running some tests/benchmarks. Figure out how much CPU usage that RAID 1, RAID 0+1, RAID 5, et cetera, array is using. Then think about if its worth buying a hardware RAID controller card.

        You need to buy the drives

        • You need to buy the drives anyways, and to set up the RAID, you'll end up reformatting the drives anyways. Other then some time, what do you have to lose?

          Hardware RAID is much more reliable. You can't boot off software RAID. If software RAID was that good, then no one would buy 3ware cards. If I'm setting up a 1 TB+ array, I'm going to spend a few hundred on a good RAID controller.
          • > Hardware RAID is much more reliable. You can't boot off software RAID. If
            > software RAID was that good, then no one would buy 3ware cards. If I'm setting
            > up a 1 TB+ array, I'm going to spend a few hundred on a good RAID controller.

            Well, its always a tradeoff, but thats not a reason to dismiss software raid totally.

            Hardware raid is easier. You can also boot off raid levels other than just mirroring.

            With harware raid, you slap in many disks, and the card lets the system see one disk (the array
    • I was gonna suggest the same thing. If price is your word, I see no problems with simple IDEs on simple PC clones running simple Linux slackware. If RAID cards are too expensive, I know a bunch of IDE controllers and a serious serious powersupply should do. Just make sure the drives are quite and low power.

      Just a suggestion, you might want to switch your home network to gigabit ethernet. That will make things run nicely and schmoodly.

  • Look at firewire direct (Score:4, Informative)

    by FattMattP ( 86246 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @06:54PM (#7038629) Homepage
    I was in the same position as you. Look at the drive systems from FireWire Direct [firewiredirect.com]. I got one of those HSB Series with two 250GB drives and it works great. It was a little over $1100 with shipping. They make them up to 2TB and you can order online.
    • These storage systems are just JBOD and they'll sell you RAID software but it only does 0 or 1. RAID0 is fine as scratch space for video editors but it's playing Russian Roulette for data you want to keep. Their only option for redundancy seems to be 4 pairs of RAID1 (in the 8 bay tower). If you get the 200GB drives that's 800GB of storage. You'd probably be better off using Linux (or Windows Server) and using the OS's RAID5 for 1400GB capacity.

      Since it uses software RAID I think it spoils it's primary app

      • These storage systems are just JBOD and they'll sell you RAID software but it only does 0 or 1. RAID0 is fine as scratch space for video editors but it's playing Russian Roulette for data you want to keep. Their only option for redundancy seems to be 4 pairs of RAID1 (in the 8 bay tower). If you get the 200GB drives that's 800GB of storage. You'd probably be better off using Linux (or Windows Server) and using the OS's RAID5 for 1400GB capacity.

        Well, the RAID software that it comes with [raidtoolbox.com] sucks but you d

  • try these (should be obvious, but what the hey) (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @06:57PM (#7038644)
    -retain shows on the hard drive until you have enough episodes of a single show to put on one DVD. Then burn the episodes onto a single DVD, labeling the DVD with somehting like "South Park - Episodes 35-47 Sept 2003 - Jan 2004"

    -Number your DVDs. Then keep a listing what's on each disk. If you're really 1337, create a small searchable database on your computer, complete with episode information.

    -Dont record everything at top quality. Cartoony shows like the Simpsons or Futurama will take less space being recorded at medium quality, and that lesser quality is less noticeable. If loss-less compresion is available, use it. (Do any DVRs have loss-less available?)
    • That second one was what I was going to suggest. I've started a system with CD-R backups where I give each a unique sequentially-assigned number and store them in the 100-pack spindles they came in. Under Linux, I copy the stuff to a staging area and create a locatedb from the staging directory using GNU locate, which I then store in the root of the disc and in a search directory I keep on my hard drive using the disc's number as the title of the database.

      It does make it much easier to search through ar

    • If loss-less compresion is available, use it.

      No, don't! Lossless compression on audio and video is unlikely to make a significant dent in the file size, and you're looking at ~1GB/min for uncompressed video. Even if you have half a terabyte of storage you're not likely to be able to keep much lying around at that rate.

    • Just do a "dir /b" (or "ls -1", I think, for you unix folks) to a master-video-list.txt (Be sure to append, not ovewrite).

      My file has grown to 12,000 or so lines (unique episodes/movies/clips).

      I search it with grep.

      I search it with a script (vchk.bat) that works on every computer in my house despite the fact that the text file is only on one computer. (Environment variables to hold harddrive letters helps one write scripts that work on all 3 computers by addressing the harddrive itself, ie %HD120G1,

  • Me personally? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @07:01PM (#7038687) Homepage Journal
    I'd use stronger compression. MPEG2 for broadcast is a hog compared to DivX and other MPEG4 related codecs.

    If I were out to archive TV, then I'd look at two approaches.

    1.) Use a PC instead of a TiVO with a program like Snapstream to capture and encode the video using DivX in real time. You can get 1.5 hours per CD, and I think 9-10 hours per DVD. If you drop the resolution to 320 by 240, you'll do even better. There's a little suffering in quality, but trust me when I say you won't notice once the show starts. Now you only need a fraction of a terabyte.

    2.) Similar to step one, only use the TiVO (or a Replay with a network out) to capture the shows and transcode it into MPEG 4. The quality will be better than the previous approach, but you'll encode the same video twice. Personally, I don't think it's that big of deal.

    There are considerations here, though.

    - Playback of DivX files to TV is *almost* there but not quite. (makes you ache for a cracked XBOX, doesn't it?) On the flip side, though, these shows will easily travel to your laptop and PCs. I've done this before, and it was DAMN COOL to have several episodes of Quantum Leap to watch when I went on a 5 day business trip.

    - Video quality probably won't be as good as captured with the TiVO. It has superior capture nad playback equipment. I can't help you there, but I can tell you that you won't notice after a while. I have a bunch of QL eps recorded at a strained bitrate, and they all came out wonderful. At first glance it's blocky, but once you're immersed, it just isn't noticed anymore.

    - I don't think this would be ideal for home movie capture. For that, I recommend a digital video camera with firewire.

    - Step 2 involves automation and extra processing. You might feel that after a while.

    Personally, I'd rather go this route at the sacrifice of some quality than to try to get a terabyte of storage going. With 250 gig drives floating around, it's not all that challenging or expensive to do, but that is a backup nightmare.
    • Playback of DivX files to TV is *almost* there but not quite.

      Sure it is. Have a look here. [kiss-technology.com].

      Plays DivX (3.11, 4 and 5), Xvid, mpeg, whatever else you can toss at it. Has ethernet and streams all formats over it directly from your computer. Also plays mp3s, wmas, flacs, wavs and oggs in the same way (or from a burnt cd/dvd ofcourse).

      And as if this was all not enough, the thing is StrongArm-based and runs Linux (though you'd never know unless you poked at it), making it very hackable.

      About $250.

      • The website linked in your post has been down for the better part of the last 12 hours. Do you have the name of that product or something I can google for and maybe find it elsewhere?

        I have been looking for just such a device and $250 sounds like a good deal, if only i could see more details :)

        Thanks
        • Certainly.

          Kiss Technology ("Keep It Simple Stupid", nerdy enough connections rigth there) are selling the DP-series of divx-enabled dvd-players.

          There's the DP-500 that I have, ethernet, no harddisk, no tv-tuner.

          Then there's the DP-558, same as above, but with harddisk and tuner, so it's able to act like a PVR in addition to streaming media over the ethernet-link.

          Recently they've started a new series, the DP-1000 and DP-1500, those are only available from medio october, allthough I saw a few prototyp

  • Silicon Mechanics (Score:4, Informative)

    by MSG ( 12810 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @07:11PM (#7038763)
    You might be able to find a less expensive option from Silicon Mechanics:

    http://www.siliconmechanics.com/

    Specifically:

    http://www.siliconmechanics.com/c221/storage-ser ve r.php

    You might even be able to order just the chassis, controller, and disks... but you'll have to figure that out on your own. We buy all of our stuff from them.
  • I made just short of a terabyte of storage using an external ATA RAID storage device from Promise Technology [promise.com] and 8 of Western Digital 120JB (special edition) hard drives. The device emulates a single SCSI drive to your own computer, so you don't need any special drivers.

    Over a year ago it cost me about $5K, including a SCSI card. Today it would cost me a lot less and I could have more then a terabyte.

    Both the Promise RAID box itself has been reliable, and I am quite happy with the WD hard drives.

    -- H

  • 3ware has a ~$400 card which will support 8 ATA drives in raid-5 and make it look like a single scsi disk. This is well supported under linux. You can buy 160-200G drives for less than $1/G. Get 8 of whichever one you can afford. For $100 you can get a mobo+processor with ethernet. Another $50 gets you a case and PS. That's about $1500. Then you either take a few weekends figuring it out and setting it up or you find someone who will do it for $100/hour = $800-1500. Hmmm. Maybe I have myself a bus
  • If dollars are tight but your time's free, buy a big-ass server case, tremendous power supply, and a pile of the biggest SATA drives you can find. Spin 'em up one-at-a-time if they're all stacked. Otherwise, the gyroscopic forces will tilt your PC.

    Realistically, if you're buying a terabyte (tibibyte?) or more of space, you have money to spare. Just buy an Xserve and Xserve raid unit, turn on NFS or SMB, and call it a day. They're brain-dead easy to set up, relatively cheap (not much more than building
    • Just buy an Xserve and Xserve raid unit, turn on NFS or SMB, and call it a day. They're brain-dead easy to set up, relatively cheap (not much more than building your own), and supported.

      Cheap? I don't think so. The Xserve RAID with 1TB of space (7 180GB drives RAID5) is $7500 alone. The fibre channel card you need to put in the Mac connected to the RAID unit is another $500. If you want more than a 1 year warranty, that's another $999. If you look at the configurator, Apple wants $500 for each 180GB PATA
    • Realistically, if you're buying a terabyte (tibibyte?) or more of space, you have money to spare.

      Ok so I'm nitpicky, it's tebibyte [wolfram.com] not tibibyte.

  • TiVo - Transcode TySteam to MPEG2 - DiVX5 (Score:5, Informative)

    by delus10n0 ( 524126 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @07:35PM (#7038922)
    That's the process I'm currently using. I've installed a network card (via 9thtee.com) in my TiVo and installed TiVoWeb on it. I also changed the "best quality" resolution to be 720x480 (instead of the default 480x480) -- I use TyTool to extract the shows onto my PC as TyStreams or MPEG2 files, and then use AVISynth scripts to crop/deinterlace them. After that I load them up into VirtualDub-Mod and cut out commercials, add the audio track, and set up a queue job to encode two passes out to DiVX AVI. I use 1250kbps for "TV Shows" and 2150kbps for "Music Videos" and higher motion stuff. For audio I use LAME --alt-preset 96 which outputs ABR 96kbps files. A 15 minute show ends up around 100megabytes. Not that bad.

    Deinterlacing television is a pain, and I think that's why a lot of people go down the MPEG2/SVCD route (it handles interlacing natively.) I've found three solutions for AVISynth that are pretty decent:

    1) Using SmoothDeinterlacer (visit www.100fps.com for more info on that)

    2) Using DeComb - http://www.neuron2.net/decomb/decombnew.html

    3) Using DGBob - http://www.neuron2.net/dgbob/dgbob.html

    Anyhow, let me know if anyone needs help. I'm going to write a guide on this soon and put up a website detailing my steps.

  • Get a media database (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Kris_J ( 10111 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @07:36PM (#7038930) Homepage Journal
    Inconvenient if you're trying to find which of 10 DVDs you put that episode of Futurama on
    You don't need more on-line storage, you need a decent indexing program.
  • Since i got broadband a few years ago i started downloading TV shows off kazaa mostly and IRC if i was looking for something specific, i know downloading tv shows is a legal grey area, but i downloaded some commercials too(anyone seen the trunk monkey car ad?). Once i had every episode of the simpsons i realized i needed some more space. Added an 80gb HD, which was later upgraded to a 160gb and so on, i currently have about a quarter TB in my main PC. I kept everything well organized, folder for each series
  • I use double sided DVD-Rs so you get twice the storage. I store them in these little cases with a selector switch so you can choose which number disc pops out instantly. What is on what number disc is in an easily grep-able text file.

    The selector cases are actually cheaper than retail leather like music folders if you buy generic instead of discgear. As for the media, Ritek makes double sided DVD-Rs that are both cheap and reliable. I have over 100 burned with zero problems accessing later, although I
    • Sounds like you think like me. I submitted a duplicate "greppable text file" comment. [I am a windows user, tho, who uses windows like unix-users use unix :) ]

      Anyway... I'm wondering... Do you have a URL for these selector cases? or a picture?

      And also.. are the Ritek double-sided DVD-Rs more than twice the cost of single-sided DVD-rs? currently i pay about 60 to 90 cents for a blank DVD-R (buy 200 at a time).

  • Depending on what you're recording, wouldn't it just be cheaper to straight out buy the stuff as it becomes available on DVD?
    That way, everything is boxed and labelled.

    Plus, if DVD-Rs are anything like CD-Rs, I don't know if I'd be willing to trust them for extended media storage (I've had several CD-Rs crap out on me after only 3 to 4 years).
    • It's taken a rather long time for Married With Children to come out on DVD, and who knows when it'll all be available?

      How about Bullshit (the Penn & Teller show that was on Showtime)... or even Penn & Teller's Sin City Spectacular?

      Buying on DVD works great when it actually comes out on DVD, even if you might have to wait a few years, and you tend to get special features, commentary tracks, etc, but not all of 'em get released. How much of a market is there for Mad Jack the Pirate? Highwayman? A
      • It's taken a rather long time for Married With Children to come out on DVD, and who knows when it'll all be available?

        October 28th for the first season in the US. Go check Amazon... hope that puts a smile on your face ;)
  • Go out and get 160-200gb hard drives. They are often well less than a dollar a gig. Then get some 4 or 8 bay firewire enclosures. Presto, tons of storage... cheap. The 4 bay enclosures cost on the order of $150... and make that $200 w/ removable trays for the drives.

    If you don't need access to your data at all times, you could get away with one 4bay enclosure + removable trays for each drive, then pop in the drive you need.

    I have put together a music system for my home stereo based on a computer and
    • If you don't need access to your data at all times, you could get away with one 4bay enclosure + removable trays for each drive, then pop in the drive you need.

      I think you hit on the solution for this guy. He doesn't need it all online all the time, he should use some kind of hot-swappable drive bay. The question is how cheap can you find the drive trays, sometimes those things cost as much as the drives themselves (well, not if they're 200GB drives).
      • I've been able to find them with built in fans for about $15.

        if you can build up your drives slowly, you can take advanage of rebate deals and pick up 200gb drives for $130 or so...
    • That would have been the punchline to a really funny joke if it the on-site 'system admin' didn't really say it and really mean it.

      Anyways, with RAID-1 you have insured through redundant hardware that a single drive failure will not destroy your data - but you haven't actually backed it up. RAID won't protect against software or wetware problems (del *.bak somehow becomes del *.* before you get your daily recommended allowance of caffeine, or what have you.)

      As an extension to the discussion (because the
  • ...but what about an Xserve RAID? The 720 gig one is $5999, the 1260 gig one $7499, and the 2520 gig one $10999. The middle one sounds like what you're looking for, and still within your price range, going by what you said. Plus, you could add another 1260 gig to it at any time later - probably even more given the inevitable increase in drive capacity. That should keep you going for another two years at least.

    And since it includes redundant power supplies and [I believe] some surge protection, it shou

  • Say whut!? (Score:5, Funny)

    by joshsnow ( 551754 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @08:04PM (#7039117) Journal
    I'm thinking that if I want to get through the next season of TV and the Holiday season at home I need to add at least a Terabyte of storage.

    I'm thinking that you've got a serious problem to deal with...

  • What when it breaks? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bluGill ( 862 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @08:13PM (#7039183)

    Once you have all this storage, what are you going to do when it is all lost. Houses burn down, harddrives crash, CDs get scratched, kids take hammers to electronics, and other disasters that I can't even think of.

    Answer that question first. If you just want the data, but don't worry too much about losing it, then 5 harddrives in a simple RAID without parity (I can never remember if that is level 0 or 1 - the other is mirror) will do just fine. If you care about losing data, then do you need offsite storage? If you need storage offsite, tape backup looks good. (perhaps cheaper than CD/DVD at the volumn you are looking at, and certinaly takes less space) DVD is nice in that you can write your videos in DVD format, and borrow a copy to anyone who wants to see your kids birthday party. However it is easy enough to burn a custom disk for anyone who wants it.

    Have you looked at nearline robots? They are more expensive than harddrives, but the worst case in the case of breakage [that doesn't take the house with it] is you loose just a small fraction of your collection, and nothing gets scratched on handeling. If your dvd drive in the reader breaks you can still use the collection. Some allow you to hook several different drives to different comptuers, if IO bottlenecks are a problem for you this would allow more people to use your collection at a time. May or may not be useful, but you should consider it.

  • Although it isn't the cheapest solution out there the Xserve Raid [apple.com] can store a lot, is expandable and is hot swappable.

    That said, you might want to reconsider saving all of those old TV shows. How often do you actually go back and watch them again? I was amassing a nice DVD collection until I realized that 90% of them I have never watched more than once.

    • Agreed. I was archiving ALL of my favorite shows, and I realized that most of them (X-Files/Futurama/Simpsons/Enterprise/Stargate/etc .) are probably coming out on DVD sooner or later, and I will just snag them then.

      Other shows, though, like MST3K and the like I archive because they'll most likely never release all of the episodes to DVD.
  • I've been considering something similar myself. After trying a few small arrays, I've decided to work towards a RAID 5 Solution.

    With eight 160GB drives on a HighPoint 454 RAID 5 controller you would have access to just over 1TB (1024^4 Bytes) after Formatting.

    I've ssen Maxtor 7200 RPM, 8MB buffer, ATA133 drives going for less than $90 after mail in rebates. With the controller your looking at under a grand, and there's nothing stopping you from buying drives bigger than 160GB.

    And of course, since it's RA

  • Go Outside (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by ripbruger ( 312644 )
    Really. It'll do you a world of good. Unless this is for business purposes (which it doesn't sound like it), it's not worth worrying about. Get some exercise.

  • some base hardware (Score:3, Informative)

    by extra88 ( 1003 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @10:41PM (#7040144)
    I've been looking at hardware to build a terabyte sized file server for work and this is basic hardware I've been looking at (prices may not be the absolute best, I didn't shop around):

    Western Digital 250GB SATA 8 MB Cache 7200 RPM $325.00 QTY 5 [Using RAID5 gets you close to 1TB]
    Sub-total $1625

    3Ware Escalade 8506-8 Serial ATA RAID
    $490.00 QTY 1

    SuperMicro SATA Mobile RackCSE-M35T1 [supermicro.com]
    $140 QTY:1

    Total $2255+tax

    The SuperMicro "RAID cage" holds 5 1" SATA drives in the space of 3 5.25" bays. I haven't found anything else that packs this many drives in such a small space. I'd be very interested to hear of people's experiences with this or other RAID cages.

    If you have a big enough case, you could add this to your existing computer and be good to go. If the case isn't big enough, just get a bigger case and move the guts of the computer into it, like a hermit crab [xs4all.nl] :)

    Alternately, you could buy/build a cheap computer with 4 5.25" bays (need one for the optical drive) and use it as a file server. Budget about $500 for it if it's really dedicated to just serving files, you can skimp on the processor, video card and the little extras. I would choose Linux for the file server but Windows would probably be okay if your main OS is Windows (but then you have to buy a Windows license which skews the cost of the file server). You would probably want to spend a little extra and get a extra pair of gigabit Ethernet NICs, one for the server, one for your desktop PC.

    The whole thing should be around $3000 which is not too shabby. It could be even cheaper if you used smaller drives but more of them.
    5 250GB @$325 = $1625
    6 200GB @$260 =$1560
    8 160GB @$156 = $1248
    The 8 drive option would probably require bigger (more expensive) case than the other two.

    For my project I'm planning on getting a 7 bay case and the 3Ware Escalade 8506-12 so I can just buy 5 more drives and another RAID cage to move up to 2TB. Woo!
    • I'd strongly suggest that you re-think what you're doing a bit.

      1. SATA is overpriced.
      2. Other companies make cooler 5400rpm drives that are just dandy for media storage. I personally recommend Samsung drives. Someone will undoubtedly chime in that Samsung sux0rs, but I've had amazing luck with them, they're dirt cheap, cool, quiet and can be found in both 5400 and 7200rpm models, some with 8MB cache (though those don't match the performance of WD *SEs).
      3. PATA 3ware controllers are cheap on ebay, if you're
      • My project is for long term (but still online) storage, no video encoding. It really doesn't require high end performance. In this case I value SATA for its cabling, not for it's supposed performance improvement. Also maybe I shouldn't have a better attitude about SATA hardware RAID cards compared to PATA, but I do.

        I don't have a problem with Samsung but they don't have anything bigger than 160GB at this point. 8 drives for ~1TB makes it a lot harder to leave room for a 2nd terabyte in a case. Cheap is goo
        • My philosophy is that more spindles are almost always better, and the $110 160GB drive has a LOT of bang for the buck. When a case gets full, I start building another computer. Even with 400W PSUs, after the seventh or so hard drive, you really start to worry about how much you can cram into one case.

  • Unlike most of the people above, I can appreciate the need to collect, and to have a perfect collection, so I won't chastise you for having so much media. (Although, I do prune my mp3/mp4 collection often now, as my 30gb laptop HD just can't handle me.)

    Something I've been doing lately: I buy cheap hard drives (I'm seeing 200gb for about 100$ US , though I'm living in Tokyo currently), and external firewire cases. Any case is fine, as long as you've got two plugs on the back for daisy chaining. This way

    • > Also, I don't know about how windows handles firewire drives (or if it even has software RAID support -- I use Linux on my PC)

      Windows 200 Pro and XP have software RAID 0 and RAID 1 capabilities built in. Should be no problem with FireWire drives (though I haven't tried it).

      - Greg

  • Mod me flamebait... (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by itwerx ( 165526 )
    ...but damn dude! Shoot your TV, get a life...
    I haven't had cable in years, and y'know what? When I'm at friends' houses (yeah, I do have friends :) I'm even happier I made that choice.
    The wierd thing is that the longer I don't have it the more I hate it when I do see it. Like reverse withdrawal symptoms or something. TV programming nowadays really is horribly poor quality but it's hard to realise that until you step away for awhile.
  • I have four machines each containing between five and ten drives (almost all Samsung 160GB drives in my case) in the 120GB - 250GB ballpark. Real storage is a little under 4TB. I use 3ware controllers whenever possible. I buy 'em off ebay for $80 or so, and they're well supported by everything. The boxes in question are 2GHz-class AMD machines with gigabit NICs (moving large files sucks otherwise). The PCs are probably worth about $1500 apiece.
    I have two Windows boxes with ATI All-in-Wonder cards that're m
    • Ever consider doing a howto for this setup? I'm especially intrigued by the 'A/V-to-cat5 distribution system'.
      • You can get a pair of RCA stereo and SVideo to Cat5 transceivers for under $100 from a lot of places. Check google. I bought mine locally.
  • For example, get a good touring bike and ride to another state or country. Less $ than terabytes of storage and something you will actually be able to look back on when you're on your deathbed. Which will likely be pushed further away since you'll be getting in shape as opposed to sitting on your butt and dying of a blood clot at age 50. Take up an activity or a hobby... anything. Don't just be a bump on a log.
  • Several people have suggesting buying 8 disks and slapping them in a cheap pc. The question is, how do you keep the disks from dying from overheating? I tried putting 3 seagate fireball 60gig drives next to each other in a server 2 years ago, and the middle one died after a week from heat. I've got 100gig, 160gig, and 150gig drives in a network file server, each seperated by an empty hd bay. I haven't had a problem so far, but each of these typically runs too hot to touch, even with the case open and a floo
    • I've run 4 7200RPM drives stacked about 1/4" apart in a machine that was always going and had no reliability issues, although I had 1 spindle motor die as the result of catastophic PS failure. No fans pointed in their direction, not even vent holes on that end of the case.
    • I recently setup a file server at home, in an old AT tower case. I just bought some of those hard drive coolers from a random website - 7 bucks a piece I think - and hooked those up. The drives are all in 5 1/4 inch bays, and I used those mounting brackets that come with most hard drives to hook them up. Fans are going to make your server noisy though, so that has to be taken into consideration. In my case, the 24 port rackmount switch makes more noise than anything, so I didn't mind =). 3 160GB drives
  • I've found myself in a similar situation, and pondered the same questions. I looked at doing an HTPC for a long time, as I also really wanted to access all the MP3s in the home theater. Here's my setup:

    ReplayTV + DVArchive. ReplayTVs have the ability to play shows recorded on other ReplayTVs, and DVArchive masquerades as a replayTV. Runs under Windows or Linux (and OS X, as well, I believe), and can be queued to automatically copy, transfer, or delete shows at scheduled times. Your replayTV will simpl
  • buy a vcr
  • Use some of your cash to buy a set of pre-indexed Futurama DVDs. As an added bonus, they come with commentary tracks and artwork, and are higher quality than your home recordings. You can get the complete Futurama for under $60 on 7 DVDs, instead of spending $45 on blank DVD-Rs to record your crappy TiVo copies.
    • Huh? I bought 100 blank 4x DVD-Rs for $70 this week. $.70 a disc, leaving me at just under $5 for the 7 discs needed to copy Futurama seasons 1 and 2.

      It's been a while since blank discs were $7 apiece.

      Also, rather that recording stuff from the Tivo, use Netflix and/or Wantedlist (for pr0n), and never pay for an actual DVD again.
  • Many older BIOS's seem to run into a limit with drives over 136G in size. I've noticed that there are updated NT drivers to get around this problem. Has anyone run into this issue with Linux and found an inexpensive work around?
  • Here you go...

    Total: $1339.46 plus Tax and/or S&H

    - Greg

  • my setup: Athlon 1.3 256MB PC2700 KT333 Motherboard 2 WD800JB (80Gb 8mb cache) hard drives 1 WD1200JB (120GB 8mb cache) hard drive Red Hat 8 the 80GB drives are 100% RAID partitions, with an equal share of the 120 added to it (software RAID5 throretical @160GB actual: 147GB) the remaining 40GB of the big drive is for /boot, /, and a separate 30GB partition used to store big ass files that i don't need long (DVD VOB's and the like). The system is on a 100 megabit, full duplex network and serves a maximum of

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