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Do You Need More Space for Your Media Needs?
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?"
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.
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.
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Quit pretending. Just admit that it's PORN you need all that space for.
if the child is starving, it needs food, not an immunization.
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".
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.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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!
If a child is starving it doesn't need immunizations
Yes, but these are immunizations against food.
I was in the same position as you. Look at the drive systems from FireWire Direct. 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.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
-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?)
Bought an e-machines and buying the largest capacity drives. Just assigning them drive letters though.
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.
"Derp de derp."
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?
You might be able to find a less expensive option from Silicon Mechanics:
r ve r.php
http://www.siliconmechanics.com/
Specifically:
http://www.siliconmechanics.com/c221/storage-se
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.
A: No.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
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.
-- Herder of Cats3ware 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 business plan here....
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 your own), and supported.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
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.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
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, all filenames were "Show Title - Episode #/production code - Episode Title", the prod.#s and episode titles i got all from here. Then i noticed a lot of the shows i had sitting on my HD were coming out on dvd. DVD has so many advantages over the stuff i downloaded/encoded myself; quality, special features, portability, etc. I started to burn entire seasons to data CD-Rs(dont have a dvd burner yet) for backup as shows were released on DVD. This's freed up A LOT of HD space. I havn't gotten around to buying all of what i've burned, still havn't bought the Dr Who, DS9, SG1 or Red Dwarf sets, but i have The first season of Farscape, and all of the Simpsons, Family Guy, Futurama and South Park Sets and also the Complete Series of Firefly on preorder. :p If your looking at several $K NAS solutions i think just buying the DVDs is within your budget. The only thing i miss about not having all the shows on HD is just opening up my playlist with every show in it on shuffle, but i guess i could get a 500 disc DVD player or something. Do they even make those?
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
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 do burn at 1x and do a full verify after.
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).
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 one of these. My 4x200gb drives give me 400gb's worth of redundant storage. The cheapest way for me to backup the data was to just get a second set of drives. Especially since my content doesn't change that frequently.
And since it includes redundant power supplies and [I believe] some surge protection, it should keep your data much safer than some generic Lintel box.
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...
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.
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.
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 RAID 5, the parity will keep you from losing your data if you have a single drive failure (If you can, keep a spare handy)
Best of luck!
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
I graduate from High School in May of 2005 you Insensitive Clod!
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.
I can't spell ripburger
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? Any one of the other thousand shows listed on TV Shows on DVD?
Yes, buying it on DVD is a rather convenient way to handle everything, and you get nice organization, but well, some of us just aren't willing to wait a decade or more until the shows that we want to collect are determined to be economically feasible to release on DVD for sale.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
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
$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
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!
Sure it's convenient, but are you really willing to pay $60-80 just for the third season of Star Trek Voyager?
Besides, then when you have friends and relatives over, you can't stand over a large server box next to your hifi equipment, grasping your belt like barney fife, sniffing loudly and saying "yeeep, this baby has three terabytes of television stored on it. And it's only half full."
In Soviet Redmond, software programs you!
Unlike most of the people above, I can appreciate the need to collect, and to have a perfect collection, so I won't chastise you for having so much media. (Although, I do prune my mp3/mp4 collection often now, as my 30gb laptop HD just can't handle me.)
Something I've been doing lately: I buy cheap hard drives (I'm seeing 200gb for about 100$ 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 you can build and add to your media array as needed. 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), but Mac OS X has the ability to treat a bunch of drives as one using Software Raid. I haven't played with it too much, but over one firewire connection it should be plenty fast. You'll likely only be streaming one movie at a time, anyway.
Of course, the bitch is when it's time to back up the collection. >_< Personally, I have stacks of CD's, usually one TV show in MPEG format on each, sorted by season and show, with labels on them. I burn as soon as I've watched to keep space on my drive free. The people above are right -- it's not often that I go back and rewatch an episode -- but there's also a sick geek power in being able to inflict the pain of Max Headroom on the unsuspecting. But VCD quality is fine for TV (I mean, VCD is nearly identical to VHS to me), and the time it takes to recompress episodes, even on a fast machine, isn't really worth it.
- Cloud
...but damn dude! Shoot your TV, get a life... :) I'm even happier I made that choice.
I haven't had cable in years, and y'know what? When I'm at friends' houses (yeah, I do have friends
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. .VOB files.
I have two Windows boxes with ATI All-in-Wonder cards that're more than capable of grabbing video and encoding it to nice, native 4000kbps MPEG2 that's very easy to export to a bunch of
Stuff that I really do want to keep gets encoded and burned to DVD.
I keep as much as I can online - on the fileservers - because that stuff is easy to index and to access. The rest gets periodically deleted. I purposefully choose not to do divx encoding or anything similar. It takes too long.
For the rest, I have a pair of 400 disc Sony DVD changers. They're addressed as one unit, and in addition to being attached to my "main" receiver, I run the receiver's output to a A/V-to-cat5 distribution system to move everything up to a second receiver upstairs. I have in-wall wired controls for upstairs, and I keep an index of what's in the changers (I have another three CD changers of similar capactiy that run in a different series) in an easily-searchable Apache-mySQL application I can hit from basically any PC in my home (it's a VERY simple app. I'm lazy about that part of things and even more lazy about data entry. If I really wanted to I suppose I could hit CDDB but frankly, most of my stuff won't be in there).
Now, I'm going to say something, and it's going to sound stupid, but... this stuff really wasn't THAT expensive. I did the wiring and set up the A/V distribution myself. A receiver that can handle video isn't that expensive ($300 for the cheapest thing money can buy). No one instantly NEEDS a $350 400 disc DVD changer right away, but it's nice to have. And a single PC with around 1TB of disk space can be had for $1300 if you really want to bargain-hunt.
So for maybe $2000, you can get 1TB of disk space in an HTPC, a receiver that'll handle A/V distribution, and DVD Changer to handle the spillover. I don't think that's a bad deal at all.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
1. 3ware has ... for $100/hour
2. s/Maybe I have myself a business plan here.../???/
3. Profit!
i believe you do!
vodka, straight up, thank you!
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.
The Jack Valenti hit squad is coming to your house!
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 floor fan pointed at the drives. I guess they're cheap for a reason.
Best mac commercial ever(mirror)
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 simply recognize the DVArchive machine as another replay named whatever you choose to name it (in my case, the brilliantly inventive "fileserver"), and you can play shows from it as you would in any other situation.
My current file server is a 2.0Ghz Celeron Dell that I got as a promo deal with a flat panel ($480 for the flat panel, $570 for flat panel, plus celeron machine, plus palm pilot). I put a Highpoint RocketRaid 404 in with a foursome of 80GB western digital drives ($50 a pop). Highpoint has win-Raid 5 drivers for the 404, and since I'm cheap as hell, I jumped on it. I'm currently looking at upgrading to Promise's SX6000, which is a 6-channel IDE hardware RAID5 controller with expandable RAM. Acquire hard drives bit by bit via rebates (buying retail drives with rebates is soooo much cheaper than parting it out all together. If time dictates otherwise, though, do it.) Best Buy has 200GB drives for $200 after rebate this week, and not a week goes by that I don't see 120GBs going for $60-70 after rebate from some manufacturer. I've actually had reasnably good luck with getting them back. Assuming RAID-5 for capacity and redundancy, it'd be $1200 for 1TB post-parity, plus ~$250 for the controller card. As far as I know, Promise's software package does support multiple cards in the machine, so just continue to add. If you're feeling lucky, I suppose you could go for a software RAID 0 and a crapload of IDE controller cards, but that's just tempting fate for little monetary gain.
BroadQ's Qcast is a software package for PS2s which streams media files to the PS2 over a network from a machine running the server software. It supports Windows, Linux, and OS X. It currently supports MPEG-1, MPEG-2, various MPEG-4 flavors, MP3 audio, JPEG, and PNG images. I use this for MP3 playback primarily. Major bonuses include the fact that remotes are cheap for the PS2, the PS2 has optical digital output for cleaner audio, and it supports component video quite easily. Picture quality, particularly on well-encoded DiVX animes is quite amazing.
My advice would be thusly: I've found DVarchive to be awesome, and I absolutely love the simple integration and the one-box-does-all aspect. But you're running a TiVO.
I had fiddled around a bit with the idea of copying recorded shows, piping them to an MPEG-4 encoder, and then playing them back with Qcast on a PS2. Assuming you already have a PS2, the Network adapter is $40, and Qcast is $50, so that's not a terribly big outlay. Assuming your fileserver isn't going to be doing anything more strenuous than hosting your media stuff, you might just splurge and go for a reasonably speedy athlon setup and have it do encoding in the offtime for storage purposes (hourlong shows at medium quality can take about 1.5GB vs. the 500 megs or so that I'd probably aim for in DiVX...) it's worth it to me to have it easily viewable and useable from my replay, but your mileage may vary.
buy a vcr
Honestly, try it. It took me 3 seconds to find meaningful results about something I have not heard anything before.
Most stuff some people intend to put in terabytes of HD will never be seen and nowadays you can find most stuff in a e-shop (or i-shop, he) somewhere.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Perhaps the solution to deal with monumental amounts of data is:
1.- Ignore most of it.
2.- Realize that you can buy most stuff in specialist shops or second hand.
The world is your library, the Internet is your index.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
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.
... how do you as a home user back up (in the true sense of the word) half a T of data? I'm not so interested in how it gets done in theory, I want to know how /. peeps do it in reality.
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 OP also has half a T of space)
Personally I currently maintain two pretty much identical servers and occasionally copy the entire dataset from one to the other - then I go back to doing real work on the original. In the event that something goes wrong I have a warm spare (just change the drive mappings on any of the machines on my network and I am back up and running, although the data replication is manual and thus not always totally up to date.). Not optimal from a cost perspective (although the machines themselves were only like $300 apiece) but it works really, really well. Or it would, in something (knock on wood) were to happen.
And you?
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
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.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Here is my list of hardware I purchased for video editing with prices listed and retailer:
;)
Knowledge Micro Incorporated
(www.knowledgemicro.com)
Tyan S2466N-4M Motherboard $215
2x1GB Infineon DDR266 RAM $440
2xAthlon MP 2800+ $520
CompUSA (Arcadia, CA)
4x300GB Maxtor ATA133/5400/2MB $1200
TigerDirect (www.tigerdirect.com)
4x4x12 (16x12x40) DVD+R/RW Burner
$120 w/$20 rebate
Media Solution
(www.mediasolution-usa.com, Arcadia, CA)
Generic Case with 350W PSU $60
400W PSU $50
Gainward nVidia GeForce FX 5200 128MB AGP 4x
$85
SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 $35
SIIG USB 2.0 3+1 and FireWire 2+1 PCI
$40
Ebay (several years ago)
Hauppauge WinTV-Radio $65
A real hefty system (financially, computation-wise, and gravitation-wise). Runs RedHat9 great however. I had to install Crux (www.crux.nu) to copy the RH9 ISOs to hard disk since the RH installer forgets about the DVD burner when it asks for CD number 2. Then I installed from hard disk. Now I just need to build MPlayer, Kino, MozFirebird and a few other apps but man! Things are so smooth right now. Mozilla comes up in a couple of 10s of seconds (it came up almost in a minute on my old Athlon 1.4GHz/1GB PC133/Xpert 2000/Seagate 40GB 5400 2MB system) and pages render so well and quickly. I got more machine than if I could pay the same for a dual G5 2GHz. But those damn case are just so damn sexy!
However, if you assume that you use about 4.4 Gigs (in real terms) per DVD-R
If you want to be precise and clearly understood, please use the proper units. 4.4 GiB is the appropriate measure for the binary capacity measure of a 4.7 GB DVD-R. (Actually, more like 4.377 GiB.) Both measures are equally "real".
Also keep in mind that your 700 MB CD-Rs store 667.57 MiB.
But if you're looking for a terabyte of storage, then you want 1 TB of storage, not one 1 TiB. Terabyte is metric measure; tebibyte is binary measure. The binary form of the metric prefixes have been around for years. Start using them when you mean binary.
And never say "gigs" or "megs". Gigs or megs of what? You need the unit of measure in there as well. If I said my computer needed 1.21 Gigs, you don't know if I mean bytes, watts, or gibi-gram-seconds. (I have to laugh when I see ads for high-bandwidth net access in units of mb/s. My TRS-80 Acoustic Terminal can do 300,000 mb/s.)
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, instead of "C:" which would be "S:" on my other computer, etc, but i digress.)
This file can be put on your webpage too. Then you will get emails from people weekly offering to give you money for your tv shows. It's fun rejecting them citing MPAA concerns. Helps make these noobs who don't know these issues exist more aware of the forces that are working against all of us.
And the advice the other guy said about "Waiting til you have enough episodes to fill a DVD-R with" is pretty good. I got up to video-cdr-1650 before I switched ot DVD-R (up to video-dvdr-80 or so now). 2 terabytes would probably not be enough for me, counting the blank space I need to capture a week's worth of shows (~100G).
I'd show you my master-video-text.txt, but I don't want my server slashdotted. and no one gives a fuck anyway.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
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?
$79.50 at new-egg.
$169.98 each at cooldrives.com.
$230 each according to Pricewatch.
Total: $1339.46 plus Tax and/or S&H
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
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
Start a happiness pandemic
face it, unless you need instant access to each and every episode of Seinfeld, you don't need to have most of the older stuff you recoreded on hard disks.
burn them onto DVD-R's
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 4 boxes at a time, pushing out DivX/Xvid movies, MP3's and CD ISO's without breaking a sweat (add a file transfer in the mix and you start having issues) but that saturation is the network talking. for home use software RAID5 is a good solution.
everything is using the standard ATA133 controller onboard, i was using the o/b raid back when the entire thing was 80GB RAID1 but the drivers were a PITA and performance 'boost' not worth the hassle.
my problem is that the 150GB i have has now only 25GB left (granted 60+ is just DivX/Svid stuff, 2/3 of which is backed up on CD (trust my movies to a hard drive alone i will not).
Am moving the server from a SX1000 case to a 2U rackmount sometime this week, have room for another RAID array. Will slap a gigabit card in when i get the $ for a gigabit switch.
If you do anything, Go RAID, 5 is best, though you need more drives, it's cheaper per gig than RAID1
ex: RAID 1 80GB array @ $100/drive (2x 80GB's): $200 or $2.50 per GB
RAID 5 160GB array @100/drive (3x80GB's): $1.87 per GB
of course YMMV, YCMV, etc, the $100 was for ease of calc.
RAID5 gives piece of mind against mechanical failure, i've lost many gigs of data (notably 80% of my Napster collected MP3'S) when 40GB died on me, and almost lost everything when a hard drive got fried when everything was in my game box (the system drive and not the data drive got blown, but it coulda been the other way around).
even with RAID5, BACKUP YOUR DATA!, burn to CD or DVD-R for archival purposes in case something happens (data gets deleted, box fragged, etc), also makes a nice way to loan your collection to friends (i have most of my videos on a series of CD's all wrapped in a 64-piece carrier, very portable. havent burned the others yet (lack of time, lack of the 13 CD's to burn DS9 season 4, etc)
future plans are to add a promise ATA100 controller and 4 200GB hard drives, placing 3 in a RAID5 and keeping the 4th as a hot spare for either array.
the rackmount has 7 bays, 3 3.5's in the rear with an 80mm near em, and 4 up front (2 5.25's, gonna put 2 200's there with coolers) and 2 3.5's (other 2 there, shouldn't have a major problem.
though i may one day do a little box hacking and get a 4U drive array holder box, bust a hole in the top of the 2U and bottom of the 4U to route the cables: instant uber storage device.
Logistical Chaos Officer http://www.slagg.org - LAN Gaming in Sarasota FL,USA