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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?"
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.
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!
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.
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-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?)
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.
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....
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
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.
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!