Discussion Storage options (at least what I do)

[RedFox 1]

Each to his own I guess, but personally anything that can house a share whether local/online then I'm all good with Infuse, what a brilliant app that is

Filebot/Emby/Infuse & AppleTV + NAS as storage for my streaming needs and pleasant things like AS of course

Used to have my basement full of boxes with discs, it was a massive relief throwing it all away

I use Infuse on my older iPhone, great app.

 

[DQ]

Holy moley, do you have an airconditioned computer floor to keep that cool?

I sit in an office (AKA: The Computer Room) with 6 PCs and misc gear like a NAS and network stuff. I have to run a ceiling fan and a tower fan to keep from sweating. Although it's nice in winter

 

[Lowpro]

Wow, it's even on wheels ... you could take it for a walk

Heavy duty casters were essential, the size and weight inside the cabinet rendered a non-issue as a result. And funny you should mention it, I could take the cabinet for a walk, yes. It would be a very short walk though. Prior to expanding the size of the cabinet (which is modular) I was using smaller wheels. The heavy duty casters I'm using now are much taller which I didn't take into consideration. As a result, the cabinet doesn't clear the door frame even with the top panel removed. I'd have the clearance if I was using the smaller wheels. Then again, if the smaller wheels were installed I wouldn't be able to move the cabinet at all. The smaller wheels just aren't rated for the weight so. It would be like sitting the bottom panel of the cabinet on bricks. With these heavy duty casters I can pull the cabinet out from the wall with one hand. Gotta love it when a plan comes together.

 

[cartman0208]

So what weight are we talking about? 200 kilos?
Funny thing is, right now I couldn't move my primary NAS at all ... it's a 19 inch unit housed in a datacenter nearby.
But both backup units can be carried one-handed

 

[Lowpro]

Holy moley, do you have an airconditioned computer floor to keep that cool?

There's actually very little that's powered on at any given time, so nothing to heat up the room. My remote control system only powers on what's needed while engaging in a given activity and even then, the only thing that generates any real heat while using my system is the home theater receiver. Well, the game consoles do push some heat, but I don't do much console gaming these days. Now my HTPC does run 24/7. It stays relatively cool though. I work full-time from home and have 3 laptops and 4 monitors that run 24/7 in the same room pretty much. The laptops don't heat the room up much actually. The monitors used to be a problem though. I used to have these older DELL Ultrasharp 24" LCD monitors that worked better than your average space heater. The heat just poured out the back of them. The DELL monitors I have now remain cool to the touch despite running 24/7. That being said, with just north of 5,000 DVD's and Blu-ray's housed in my home office I do go out of my way to keep the humidity in check. I've always been mindful of that so. Helps to maintain the lifespan of the media. Well, it's worked out that way so far anyway.

 

[KidJoe]

How long do burned discs last? While I have some DVDs I burned 20+ years where only a hand full don't read anymore. At the same time I have a few blurays from 5 or so years ago that don't read.

So I just took an old PC (i7-8700K/16gig ram), with a case that holds 9 x5.25" external facing drives(Antec Nine Hundred), added some 3x3.25" in 2x5.25" bays with extra fans (so I could fit more drives), with an add in PCIe SATA card. It currently has 6x8TB and 6x14tB drives (pooled into striped parity pools, using windows storage spaces), for all my movies and TV shows (ripped and downloads). I run Plex Media server on it, and use a mix of devices for play back. No more need to search for and fetch a disc, and no worry that a burned disc will no longer read. Sure special features require a little extra work (ripping, naming, etc. to add to plex)

 

[Lowpro]

How long do burned discs last? While I have some DVDs I burned 20+ years where only a hand full don't read anymore. At the same time I have a few blurays from 5 or so years ago that don't read.

One's mileage may vary I suppose. To date I have yet to enounter a DVD-R or BD-R I've burned that no longer plays. I have encountered a few retail (pressed) Blu-ray's that don't play anymore though. In each case they were known issues related to where the discs were replicated at the time. And actually, just the other day I moved the data off a bunch of CD-R's I had burned back during the early years when CD-R's became a thing. I did have trouble reading a few of them. I dusted off an old desktop I had upgraded to Windows XP. The drive in that was able to read the problematic discs without issue. Whatever works, right.

 

[DQ]

We are all very sick people

 

[RedFox 1]

One's mileage may vary I suppose. To date I have yet to enounter a DVD-R or BD-R I've burned that no longer plays. I have encountered a few retail (pressed) Blu-ray's that don't play anymore though. In each case they were known issues related to where the discs were replicated at the time. And actually, just the other day I moved the data off a bunch of CD-R's I had burned back during the early years when CD-R's became a thing. I did have trouble reading a few of them. I dusted off an old desktop I had upgraded to Windows XP. The drive in that was able to read the problematic discs without issue. Whatever works, right.

Back in the day, I guess it was just after the turn of the century,I was highly involved in the burning community. I found that if you didn't use quality media (Taiyo Yuden or Verbatim both Made in Japan only) the discs began to deteriorate quite frequently. I found that BenQ DVD drives were what I needed to use back then, before BD became a thing, Taiyo Yuden in Japan went out of business a while ago and now the name is still used but they are manufactured in Taiwan, and the quality has deteriorated. I do not burn discs anymore, I just stream video. It was fun while it was peaking but time moves on and new things arrive in this market. Life goes on.

 

[Lowpro]

Back in the day, I guess it was just after the turn of the century,I was highly involved in the burning community. I found that if you didn't use quality media (Taiyo Yuden or Verbatim both Made in Japan only) the discs began to deteriorate quite frequently. I found that BenQ DVD drives were what I needed to use back then, before BD became a thing, Taiyo Yuden in Japan went out of business a while ago and now the name is still used but they are manufactured in Taiwan, and the quality has deteriorated.

Good point and something I forgot to mention. The quality of media used is paramount. It's something I've always mindful of. I purchase all my BD-R's off EBay, Verbatim's shipped from Japan. And yes, the quality isn't as consistent as it used to be since Taiyo Yuden went out of business. Well, with respects to BD50's anyway. Be that as it may, I continue to have good success. And besides, anything I burn to BD-R I have backed up on network storage anyway including any assets generated during the Blu-ray authoring process. If I do ever encounter a BD-R that's no longer up to the task I'll just burn another one. Redundacy is never a bad thing.

 

[DQ]

I digitize everything but I do keep all the originals. I find it just far easier to use them digitally. Ironically for me all this started back in the day ripping songs to MP3 off my CDs. So I went from that to a room full of technical shenanigans. Now being divorced and not having anyone tell me NOT to do that also helped. Well that and being a giant nerd.

 

[KidJoe]

Back in the day, I guess it was just after the turn of the century,I was highly involved in the burning community. I found that if you didn't use quality media (Taiyo Yuden or Verbatim both Made in Japan only) the discs began to deteriorate quite frequently.

Same here. That is basically what I got. I spent lots of time on Club MyCE in their forums, discussing media,drives and such.

 

[Lowpro]

Same here. That is basically what I got. I spent lots of time on Club MyCE in their forums, discussing media,drives and such.

Club MyCE. Nice! Talk about at trip down memory lane.

 

[RedFox 1]

Club MyCE. Nice! Talk about at trip down memory lane.

Myce is blasphemous. It's always been CdFreaks to me. Long ago and far away. I was there in 1998 when it started as crack forum. Then it evolved.

 

[dbdbdb]

My solution:
I had so many DVDs and Blurays (legit ownership) that the wife was too frustrated to watch anything (before streaming was really a thing). She said DO SOMETHING WITH ALL THAT!!! So, I started with a Dlink media player stereo unit, but you had to re-encode everything to mpeg-2, and I would lose my DVD special features and stuff (which, being old school, I want to keep). A friend of mine said "just ISO 'em!" so I found Slysoft. Next, I purchased a trio of Patriot 4 bay NAS'... (I think 1x DN4300 and 2x DN4600). Then one day, I decided to upgrade from 2TB to 4TB drives. The way these NAS' worked, you basically would have to download them to your computer, upgrade 1x drive at a time, and then copy it back and I was running on 1Gbe and hardwired ethernet. It took a couple of weeks. Well, I started looking to upgrade to 6TB drives a short while later and said no way in hell I'm doing that whole copy down, upgrade copy back thing again, so I tried putting the drives from the NAS into a repurposed rig with Ubuntu Server. Ubuntu server could read my oldest Patriot 4 bay NAS drives as RAID drives, but the 2x newer Patriots, couldn't be read. I found out, in order to read the new Patriot NAS drives on a Linux system, I would need to recompile the Linux Kernal into a special block size to be able to read those drives from that NAS. WHAT??? That means getting Linux source code and the like. So let me get this straight... If my Patriot (white) units go bad, I'd really have no way to access the drives and things would be lost. NO, this is not sustainable. Ditching the Patriot NAS', I upgraded the repurposed rig (mobo, proc, memory) from a Core 2 Quad to a core i7-4770K (dual purposed as a Virtual Box server) with PCI 3.0 2x 16 port Avago adapters in IS mode (HBA mode). Transferred a test to the computer. I streamed, at the same time, 2x bluray ISOs, 1 HD MP4, and 2 DVD ISOs from the computer to 5 different machines in the house and I was only using about 1GB of RAM and about 75% of one of the 4 cores of the Core 2 Duo (I later upgraded to the core 2 quad, but really didn't need to, and then to the 4770K, and given that Bluray is up to about 25Mbps, and DVDs are up to about 5Mbps bit rate, my hard wired network in the house had ZERO issues streaming and the server handled it just fine on a 7200RPM Maxtor drive. I've since upgraded that server rig (like I mentioned), and I have SSD as a boot device, SSD as a Virtual Box image drive, and ISOs/MP4s on HDDs (5400 and 7200 RPM drives - 7200 because got a good deal, Enterprise drives, brand new) and then have some spares that I used to take backups of all I have. I mean, think about it, no need to have a live mirror because the data is 99% static - it will never change once it's there.

The sheer volume of what I have, and what I came from, there's no way discs would work anymore. For me, it's a server and HDDs all the way. I'm not running plex. Just good ol' fashion ISO and Windows/Linux/Mac media players. I am eyeing KODI as a possible interface upgrade, but haven't decided yet. Now that being said, there is a price factor here. Disc media is probably cheaper, in the short term, but disc media has a max recommended life (I think DVD was 11 years depending on how it was kept (environment) ). So 1) all the discs burned would have to reburned at some point; 2) you would have to have backups on disc or HDD - if disc, those too would have to replaced at some point due to age of the media; 3) Switching between the potential volume of media makes this unreasonable in my opinion (not poopooing on others solution, kudos you found something that worked for you). HDDs will fail too over time and have to be replaced. The bigger the drive, the more potential for loss, but I keep backups on additional HDDs. Also, I have the HDDs on the server in a side case external to the server. In an emergency, unplug a few cables, and take the case with the drives and you are good.

Best of luck to you all.

db

 

[Lowpro]

The OP probably had no idea they'd see this type of engagement in their thread. I was actually quite surprised. Another person who watches their AnyStream downloads from BD-R. Too cool for school. Following the crowd is overrated. The world wouldn't be a very interesting place if everyone rolled the same way.

 

[KidJoe]

Myce is blasphemous. It's always been CdFreaks to me. Long ago and far away. I was there in 1998 when it started as crack forum. Then it evolved.

that is what it was called first.. I forgot it, it was so long ago. I started with a HP 4020i writer around 1995 and started finding info from there.

 

[Lowpro]

I was there in 1998 when it started as crack forum. Then it evolved.

What kind of crack are we talking about here exactly? Inquiring minds want to know. Keep it forum friendly though.

 

[RedFox 1]

What kind of crack are we talking about here exactly? Inquiring minds want to know. Keep it forum friendly though.

Not the kind of crack that the kids use today I assure you. I am referring to sharing codes for other software or actual crack tools, Keygens, and such. Back in 1998, they were very easy to code and reproduce a viable access code. I of course was never involved with that nonsense, but I was very involved in writing better firmware for optical drives.

 

[DQ]

Not the kind of crack that the kids use today I assure you. I am referring to sharing codes for other software or actual crack tools, Keygens, and such. Back in 1998, they were very easy to code and reproduce a viable access code. I of course was never involved with that nonsense, but I was very involved in writing better firmware for optical drives.

You mean "serialz"