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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?"
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.
Wow, that seems like a LOT of work to archive video.
And, once you've modified the video off the Tivo, how do you view it? The Tivo is not gonna handle your ultimate compression scheme. Do you just view it on a PC?