What Does Your Storage Environment/Media Server Look Like?

[scmeis1]

I went pretty basic.

promise ex16350 (16 port sata raid) Raid 6 availability.
10 x wd7500aaks (750G) (Raid 5)
2 x 160G raptors in raid 0
1 external 1G Fantom drive Firewire 800.

The 10 wd7500aaks drives are in 2 (5 x 3) sata hotswap cages for easy maintence.

The 10 drives are in Raid 5, I downgraded from Raid 6 as 2 parity stripes seemed a bit much, when I really do not have many drive failures. Western digital is extremely fast on their warranty work.


I have this in a coolmaster 800 case. MB of ASUS maximus extreme. I have 8 Gig of G.Skill memory with an intel Qx9650 processor.
A nice 8800GT Evga video card, a 4 port SIIG firewire 800 card. An older creative X-Fi platinum audio card (better cards out there now).
Koolermaster Exos2 water cooling system.

of course the LG GGW-H20L for HD playback and backup ability.

 

[Datus]

Good post

Been looking into this myself and this thread is a good start.

My question is I have a pc which works fine and all I want really is to attach it via utp,usb or sata(controler) to a disc box, is there such a system?

This box would then contain 3+ drives and I would probably place this in my cinema cabinet.

Im reading up on unraid also.

 

[erikt]

I've got a low-tech system, but it works for me. Two PCs built from spare parts running Debian linux. One is my file-server/P2P client/SSH2 gateway and the other is my backup machine. The file-server is on 24/7, the backup machine is normally off. Once a week, the file-server turns on the backup machine with a WOL packet and performs an rsync backup, then turns it back off. The file-server has 12 HDDs, the backup has 8 HDDs. Both machines have 4.25TB of storage using a mix of 5400rpm and 7200rpm drives, IDE and SATA, 250GB, 500GB and 750GB. All drives spin-down when not in use. Managing all of the separate disks is only a minor pain, my HTPC front-end (Meedio) hides it from me.

BTW, for those trying to cram extra HDDs into a case (I'm using generic $20 mid-tower cases), I found some $4 brackets made by Startech that allow you to put a 3.5" HDD in a 5.25" slot.

erikt

 

[dharris]

Spent some time looking at a bunch of options and I am starting to lean towards the unRAID solution. Fairly positive responses and i really like the flexibility. My only concern is management but its seems to be pretty self-sufficient. Currently have 6 500GBs HDs but looking to change over to 750GBs (since the price point is attractive ~130-140/per drive).

Other option still looking at is using Windows Home Server with its disk extender solution but this is really about drive consolidation and less about back up...still need to determine my priorities...

 

[BLKMGK]

Spent some time looking at a bunch of options and I am starting to lean towards the unRAID solution. Fairly positive responses and i really like the flexibility. My only concern is management but its seems to be pretty self-sufficient. Currently have 6 500GBs HDs but looking to change over to 750GBs (since the price point is attractive ~130-140/per drive).

Other option still looking at is using Windows Home Server with its disk extender solution but this is really about drive consolidation and less about back up...still need to determine my priorities...

unRAID is mostly an appliance once running, I look at my WEB page for status occasionally and to see when it looks like I'll need more drives. It can be setup to alert on a drive failure but I've not bothered.

I have 2 friends running WHS, one built it himself and it locks up about once a week or so, he's not sure why. Another has zero issues with lockups with a purchased system from HP I think but has seen the infamous data corruption issue. Both report that the console won't easily load on Vista 64 for management WHS is at it's core Server 2003 but with parts removed so you CAN get some other stuff running on it and they offer a WEB service to allow remote connection to the server when away from home. Buffalo is offering a similar service it looks like.

 

[windsorr]

I wouldnt put drives anywhere near your TV cabinet as they are big heat generators and hense generate a lot of Fan noise...I have mine configured to be NAS and are hidden in a cubaoard at the other end of the house...well out of earshot....cheers rich

 

[peterbus]

You can do this in XP and Vista as well, not sure about Windows 2000 though.

The only catch is that the drive you are setting up the mount points on must be formatted in NTFS - for most systems this shouldn't be an issue and your boot drive was probably setup as NTFS as it is the default for XP and Vista. You may also need the drives you are mounting to a folder to be formatted in NTFS as well - just haven't tried so I'm not 100% sure on that one, but if you have problems that would be the first place I'd look.

Step #1:
Make a folder off your boot OS drive (most likely your C-Drive). I call mine HDBANKS. Make a subfolder in HDBANKS for each hard drive that you want to access without a drive letter (i.e. HD00, HD01, HD02, etc.).

Step #2:
Make sure the hard drive you want to create a mount point for is available and currently accessible on this system.

Step #3
Go to the Control Panel, Administrative Tools, and run Computer Management. Once the program is run, select Disk Management on the left side tree menu. This will display all the drives in your system. Find the drive you want to setup the mount point for in the UPPER list of drives and right click on it. Select 'Change Drive Letters and Paths'.

A new dialog box will appear, press the Add Button and make sure 'Mount in the following EMPTY NTFS folder' is selected and click the Browse Button. Find the folder you created in Step #1 for this drive and OK on out.

Step #4
Assuming you don't want the drive letter any more for this drive, go back into the 'Change Drive Letters and Paths' option and highlight the drive letter and select remove.

Step #5
If you want network access to the files, go ahead and share out the HDBANKS folder you created in Step #1

You won't lose your data when doing this so you don't have to worry about that (or more accurately, I've done this literally hundreds of times and have never lost any data - your results may vary!!!!). Seriously though, if your data was visible before you started the process it will be visible after wards - just now it will be visible as a folder on your boot drive.

If you have virus protection and you don't store any files you are concerned about being infected on your media drives, I'd exclude this folder from your virus scanner engine. You don't necessarily won't the virus engine scanning 20 to 50GB ISOs or large meda folders/files any way, and some virus protection may not know how to deal with mount points.

Lastly, if you want a totally KIS solution and you are okay with keeping bare HDs on a shelf and just grabbing the one you want and putting it into your Media PC to play without needing to reboot your Media PC, etc., the ThermalTake BlackX Solution is awesome. (http://thermaltakeusa.com/product/Storage/hdd_station/blacx/blacx.asp) They also make an SE version which is nice because it includes a USB hub, but the cover mechanism gets in the way and you can't power off the drive without powering off the USB hub. It essentially makes "bare hard drives" as easy to use a USB Flash Memory Stick!

.
thanks for the info,works a treat,keeps all my video files in one list,excellent.:rock:

 

[markcu]

NAS boxes:- 3 x Thecus 5200 with 2.5TB in each box (raid 5, 2TB useable)

Main PC:- 8 core, 16G, 2 x 8800GTS 512 5TB, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray, pwerdvd and anydvd HD

Media PC:- Shuttle PC with E6800 CPU, 4G, running vista media centre, powerdvd and any DVD HD, Blu-Ray

all conected up with Gigabit, and a 16 port netgear gigabit switch.

 

[therivetman]

Quit saving

All,

I post this in this thread because its really only an issue as we have started burning BRs and HDDVDs. Given the massive size of these files, storing over 25 starts becoming a real investment (yes i know you can shrink them but for now, lets assume your not).

My set-up has been a separate media server (basic intel board running a P4) with 7 x 500 GB drives set up in a RAID 5 using an expensive Areca RAID card with 8 ports. This gives me 3TB of storage to-date. I am now maxed out and I am adding my last 500GB hard drive for this card...but it got me thinking...what are the rest of you doing about storing your BRs/HDDVDs? Is my RAID 5 overkill? Are you using software RAID 5? How big is your media server?

I am curious because I am facing having to buy another RAID card (either a 16 port or another 8) and I would like to know what the majority of you are doing before i make the investment...

PS If this should be moved to another thread, I understand....

I quit saving them or copying them. I just play the originals. Not worth the headache I just put the originals in a safe place. It costs as much to store them as it does to buy it. By the time your original wears out you can buy a copy for 9 bucks usually.

 

[Franklin]

Great thread! I have a 3 TB Infrant Ready NAS, and a couple 2 TB Buffalo Terastations for a total of 7 TB storage. I use RAID 5 because of the time it takes to rip and store DVDs. All are connected to a Linksys Gigabit ethernet switch, which routes over CAT6 cable to 5 different computers interfaced with HDTVs. All the computers have Gigabit ethernet cards and Nvidia 8400 or 8500 video cards. I use Meedio as my frontend.

This system works great for me with regular DVDs, but I have experienced frequent problems with frame skipping and jittery playback with HD DVDs and Blurays ripped as isos to the NAS devices. I just assumed the data rate was excessive for ethernet playback. Am I the only one seeing this, and if so what might be the problem in my setup?

 

[BLKMGK]

My thoughts on ripping

I quit saving them or copying them. I just play the originals. Not worth the headache I just put the originals in a safe place. It costs as much to store them as it does to buy it. By the time your original wears out you can buy a copy for 9 bucks usually.

I keep my media put away for multiple reasons - the biggest being that it's a lure for thieves. A rack of 600DVD or at this point even a handful of HD media is a serious temptation. This really hit home when guys came into my home to deliver something and literally stopped in their tracks to closely examine my racks of DVDs oohing and aaahing. If you've got racks of DVD around the house you may have experienced this yourself. Wear is the least of my worries frankly. Hell even stealing the media isn't that big a deal - it's what else they might do while they're at it.

I also got pretty sick of friends and relatives borrowing media and then having to track them down again at a later date to retrieve it. Having to get off my butt and paw through a ton of media in order to choose something to watch vs simply selecting it from a list while sitting on my couch was also a factor. Having additional meta data for each film available is an additional benny.

I agree that at their full size HD media is expensive to rip and store. For that reason I compress it, I do not compress SD DVD. On my 47inch screen I cannot see the difference and when compressed it's much more manageable albeit without the extras and menus. Rips compressed end up, for me, at around 10Gigs or so and that's acceptable. I could go smaller but don't bother <shrug>

 

[thedatman]

I always knew I would need this thread someday. So I'm out of usb ports and now have a laptop with an hdmi out for the bedroom set.

At first I was making plans to network them together and get a server , that would be way over my head. Reading Freedom's post
"1 - Keep It Simple! Keep It Simple! Keep It Simple! Keep It Simple!" this came to mind. I already have 4 1tb mybooks and 2 500g internal drives. All files are ISOs and I have a folder on my desktop with shortcuts to each movie from every drive. You have a master folder with all my movies on it.
Now it's nice being able to access every movie but after read about all the cost, heat, wear and tear on drives, ,power requirements,not to mention technical know-how. So what I thought might work is to simply create folders with a list of movies from each drive and print labels and stick them on each drive. so if I want to watch something off drive 3 simply plug in drive 3, on either TV. Done! how's that for simple.

My question to you guys is, currently I have the master folder with shortcuts. I'm sure this won't work anymore. Can I assign a letter to every drive and both computers will only see that drive as it's assigned letter. So no matter which drive is plugged in it will see them in the assigned order.

Then I would make new folders with shortcuts only for that drive and drive 1 would always be seen as drive one no matter how many are plugged in.

 

[thedatman]

ok that was easy. I should try before I ask how. At least for a while this will work. Now I'm thinking I can assign each drive the same letter in both computer then create the shortcut folders then when I want to watch a film check my folders to see what drive the movie is in, then plug in the drive and click the shortcut. I understand it will be a little bit of a hassle but will be very simple

 

[BLKMGK]

Umm, what will you do when a drive crashes?

 

[thedatman]

I don't know I would have to redo all on the drive. Does anybody backup their drives on drives? I never had one go bad. I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

So far my way of assigning the same letter in both computer works.

 

[BLKMGK]

I am not backing up, since I am using unRAID a drive failure will not effect me as it would you. If a drive fails I still have access to the data and it gets restored onto the replacement drive. If two drives fail at once I lose the data from those two drives but no other data. I am able to use whatever drives I have laying around or find on sale and when not in use my individual drives spin down to save power. Accessing the data spins up whatever drive the data is on and the parity drive if data needs to be written. All of the drives appear as individual shares but I can have shares that span drives for the purposes of consolidating listings of files - like say DVD or HD-DVD movies. This isn't perfect - fire or lightning strike would be disaster - but 7+tb worth of data cannot simply be backed up and set aside easily on a consumer's budget. 20-40 mins to rip an SD DVD is not bad to recover - till you have to do it 500+ times! HD movies take multiple hours to process apiece.

If you've got anywhere near the amount of movies I've got losing data is NOT fun! Figuring out what to do NOW is probably not a bad idea. I have quite a bit of music on my system too, it was enough effort to put THAT together that in addition to being on my unRAID server (one copy on each server!) I also have an offline backup of it. In the past I've lost my music collection twice, this third time I'm being VERY careful.:bang:

I cannot so easily do that with my movies but I've done the best I can to protect them to include a decent sized UPS etc. <shrug> Up to you but losing data sux and it WILL happen given enough time.

 

[thedatman]

Thanks for the info. I need to learn a lot more about this. I'm sure the day will come when I lose a drive

 

[BLKMGK]

Thanks for the info. I need to learn a lot more about this. I'm sure the day will come when I lose a drive

To date I've lost 2-3 drives in my servers, usually to infant mortality. Thus far no data lost as a result of those failures.:rock: I only buy WD or Seagate, preferring Seagate for their warranty. 1TB drives are dropping in price pretty good. These days I only buy one when I run out of room since stockpiling "good deals" is stupid - prices drop that fast!

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2395.new#new Is a good example of what I mean, $139 for 1TB drives is sick and I'm tempted to use some of these to begin upgrading my IDE machine to SATA. Peruse the forums there to learn more, there are other solutions out there as well, but this one meets my needs. NOT the fastest but it's reliable and I can stream HD all day long without worries. <shrug> Family is in the other room right now looking for a good movie to watch off the server actually.:agree:

 

[thedatman]

In the short term I'm planning to continue using these WD mybooks. Once I fill one up I can unplug it and put in a file cabinet. Then using it when I want either upstairs or down. If one starts to make wierd noises I will back it up on another one.

I will have to go to micro center to find out more info on servers and the "unraid " setup you are using before I find myself here ":bang:"

 

[thedatman]

tell me this. Is there any danger in filling up a HDD all the way? I'm putting a ISO file on one right now and will leave only 67 mb of space. Only ISOs are on this drive.