I've had zero issues running BD rips compressed over my 100meg cables. I only upgraded the one because I moved a server down there and the speeds plummeted until I got GigE setup to it. No buffering or anything when I've played movies and my stuff is pretty high bitrate too!
The unRAID folks like the Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 cards. I have one but have yet to use it or the two 2TB drives I bought with it. NEVER buy drives till you are nearly out of space! Might be a good price but if you cannot use it right away hold off, prices keep dropping...
That card handles 8 drives but no RAID which is perfect. NewEgg sells it for $100ish I think. Comes with cables too which is nice. Check the unRAID forums for more hardware deals like that - we're always on the hunt for cheap drives and good SATA hardware...
An upgrade for me goes like this... Buy new drive. When drive arrives decide depending on size if it will become my new parity drive or a new data drive. It will become parity if it's bigger than any other drive in the system. Shut down system from web interface. Insert new drive. Power up drive and tell system to either format drive or build parity depending on purpose. Wait, Wait some more. When done all is good!
Now, I do not have access to all drives as a single volume. I can access them as shares or as separate disks or both ways actually. Hard to explain but my upgrade really is THAT easy. And I have done it MANY times. In fact I have also swapped motherboards with no issue! Swapped from IDE to SATA with a bit more trouble - I had to copy files over. Did that with Midnight Commander in an SSH session so it didn't have to come across the wire. If you had good luck with the FreeNAS you'll LOVE unRAID!
Dude seriously? For a HOME system? Hot spares and striped data?! No thanks. I'll risk losing two drives so long as it doesn't effect the rest of my data and in my system it doesn't. I also want to be able to use standard tools to recover the drives if corruption occurs - I can do that with my system which has ReiserFS on the drives.
FWIW I have not had issues with drives bought at the same time failing - not yet anyway. However it IS a good idea to use a Sharpie to put the install date on the case so you know how old they are for warranty purposes. I actually have a damned Seagate now that their tools say is bad but their database doesn't recognize and I know it's under warranty - grrr! Failed in my Tivo of all things! Not had a failure in either NAS in about 2+ years.
No not so complex as you make it sound -> http://www.lime-technology.com/ and you can build one yourself if you choose. Don't use USB and DO have something to protect it but I don't like normal RAID for this - too power and space hungry.
I've got room for 30TB of data storage in two machines for a total of 60TB. However I have only populated them to around 12TB right now, I don't add drives till I'm out of space!:-) Not what I would call massive yet but getting there!
In fact a friend of mine DID! His Drobo fucked up so often he nearly threw it out a window! He pinged me one night raging about it yet again. I told him to head for Fry's and when he got back with $600 worth of hardware he was good to go. His hardware booted unRAID luckily and when he was done and the parity all setup and the disks built he had a solid system that replaced TWO Drobo for $600. Sold his Drobo to folks on Amazon and was ahead in the money dept! The software he's running will support 15 data drives same as mine and I've got two of them. I see zero point in owning the Drobo, too much money for the hardware and the headaches. Took me years to get him off that crap and he is way happier now!
The only issue I see with that is in order to access any of your data all drives must be spinning - that's a waste of power. This is caused by data being striped. What happens to your data if two drives die at once? Or three? Do you lose it all or just those drives? Can you use standard recovery software on the drives?
IMO SATA is fine, ZFS looks interesting but I'm happy already.
That's a waste of drive space. The system I use puts parity on one drive, the OS on a USB, and the rest of the drives are standard format drives that can be mounted under Linux should I need to try data recovery (ReiserFS). Data is not stored redundantly and I can use any size drive I want so long as the Parity drive is bigger or of equal size. With 16 2TB drives I get 30TB worth of storage per server...
unRAID - worth looking into at least. Won't have some of the ability of the Home Server to run apps on it but it's an appliance for storing video and doesn't have the fat OS install either.
Correct, 5400drives are fine for viewing 1080P video and actually so is 100meg ethernet but transferring data is slow so go GigE. Consumer NAS are indeed junk, a friend just emo-raged and pitched two Drobo onto Amazon's sales board. He stormed down to Fry's and bought $600 worth of hardware and drives to build an unRAID and is now quite happy with his new appliance that no longer needs care and feeding nor smokes interfaces. ATOM systems can be done but finding a board with enough slots and enough SATA is near impossible for a large system:-( Use a normal mobo and underclock a Celeron or AMD CPU and you'll be fine so long as you choose a reaosnable PSU that's "green". Big tower is a good idea and use the drive trays that lay drives on their side, I use SuperMicro units and can get 5 drives where 3 would normally fit.
I have two of these servers now. Each server can hold as many as 16 disks (possibly more actually as the programmer keeps bumping that up) with one disk reserved for parity. Data is NOT striped and parity is ONLY stored on the one drive. If a disk fails I lose no data, if two fail I lose two disks of data but nothing else. No hot spares or any other crap. If a disk isn't being used it goes to sleep and saves me heat and power. Disks can be ANY size but the parity disk must be as big or bigger than any of the data disks. Runs on a pretty decent selection of hardware although keeping the list of what works and what doesn't up to date is apparently tough since hardware changes so fast. It's Linux based but pay for play, yes he's followed the GPL. It's not super expensive and it boots from a USB drive to be web administered. I use full tower cases with SuperMicro 5n1 trays, 2gig of memory, Celeron CPU, power saving PSU, and supported mobo that have onboard video and GigE which you WILL need.
Their forums are a big help and active, users are working to expand the capabilities of these NAS and the programmer is working on making that easier too. Check it out, I've not found anything better yet and with some of the newer versions of SAMBA in the code it's pretty fast too! Perfect for a HTPC but not so great for a big transactional database
There are some performance flashes that can be done in a demo mode that go back to normal performance after XX hours of driving but other than that I've never heard of a timed or triggered kind of thing being done. That would take extra ordinary access to the code and most flashes just modify tables for lookups. Even that is tough since the damned firmware is encrypted by most every automaker! Making this worse would really piss me off, these guys are not understanding what they are talking about IMO. Yes, the systems are integrated on a CAN BUS, they did it for a good reason, stop bitching! The last thing we need is OBD being trashed for "security" so no one can fix the cars...
The auto industry ALREADY encrypts the daylights out of most of their code! Which makes modifying it for performance reasons a PITA. I have to pay some guy a pile of cash to "flash" my current ECU because only a few guys have managed to figure out the code for it unlike with other cars. Duh, it's a computer and it controls things so yes it can be messed with.But the auto industry already encrypts it and makes this difficult. So long as the auto dealers are able to modify things like speedometers and other things this will always be a "threat" so stop running around like Chicken Little. Sheesh! What they should turn off the OBD-II standard codes so no one but a dealer can diagnose and make minor changes to cars? See how SEMA will like that and all of the independent garages and shade tree mechanics. then they will bitch that it's too locked down. Make up your minds and stop being so short sighted...
Umm, I run XBMC and have for quite some time. I do usually use a remote but when I want to use a mouse I have no issues. In fact with a new skin I'm currently using the mouse right-click is the only way I've found to update source libraries. the mouse works fine! Now, it might not work while displaying a DVD menu as I've honestly not tried it. I guess I don't understand why you want a mouse so badly.
HDMI is treated like a DVI output.A DVI output that also supports sound etc. - it's all I've ever use don my setup. I'm on those forums too so by all means ding me if I can be of help. I'm no Linux pro though but I have managed to achieve great success with XBMC. Wish I could say the same for Myth. Currently I extract from a Tivo HD with KMTTG and torrent for TV.
Funny, I couldn't name a baseball player if you paid me, don't watch "reality" TV, and could care less about fashion. Some of my coworkers may care about it and sometimes the topics come up but we all get along just fine and treat one another as equals - something you probably don't understand. No loss here at all.
Our team works well together, we support one another solving problems, and we're quite productive without prima donnas on staff. You on the other hand seem to be one of those sorts that just wants requirements slipped under the door and no interaction. You wouldn't fit in nor last long in our environment, or that of any other place I've worked - or would care to work.
I realize you think you're an asset but honestly you're closer to an ass and sound pretty maladjusted. You look down on others from your high horse and point at the "lemmings" as if somehow superior; truly it's you who are losing in more ways than you realize. Folks don't laugh with you, they laugh at you. Thankfully I know you won't be getting past the front door and into my workspace any time soon.
Places of work are also social havens. People who can talk and find common ground often work well together. When I and others interview people to join our team we also interview their social skills to see if they will fit. If someone walked in the door with your attitude it would be a very short interview!
Yup and taking way longer to do it I'm sure. I've not got a clock ticking off deadlines for me or anything but when I did Watchmen for my HTPC and it took near 24hours to compress I nearly had a cow! Obviously I go for very high quality and max size compression and I also want to be able to use my computer for other things. 2cores just wasn't enough even overclocked sky high. 4cores made a huge difference, 6 would be even better. the Hyperthreading is icing on the cake! My current machine even beats CUDA implementations that only use the graphics card and I get way more flexibility on profiles and filters. If the Intel CPU weren't so expensive I'd own one now. If the AMD could prove itself better than my existing crazy setup I'd sure consider it if the price were right...
Video compression is my excuse - I'm tempted to buy the Intel 6core actually! I currently run a 4 core I7, with Hyperthreading I see 8 cores and I max that out 100% for hours at a time compressing HD video. Yes, the pseudo cores help. I went from 24 hour sessions on some movies to under 4 hours just by moving to this CPU. Additional instruction sets, 8 cores, and 4.2ghz vs my previous 2 core 3.2ghz are all responsible. this puppy is water cooled and still hits 82degress Celsius! Would I take more cores? Hell's yes! Would I want to move to an AMD 6core vs the Intel.... I dunno'. I will look at the benchmarks but my gut says no that it wouldn't be much of a help. I know that an Intel quad core running slower than my dual still sped things up but this I7 920 screams and with AMD's general lack of performance lately I'm not sure even another 2 cores would match it. I guess the benchmarks will tell.
Oh and not this isn't a profession or a job just something I do for my HTPC. I do it often enough that I want it faster too! Shows recorded on my DVR, BluRay, and other sources all provide grist for this particular CPU:-)
Nice, no reason this is rated so low! I do notice that there are several LiveCam Cinemas out there - any idea what the differences are? Is it just the market that changes the model number? I see them ending in 0001 and 0002 and 0003 from Dell. Weird! Some are listed as "HD" but all seem to support the same 720P. I've ordered a 0002 model from Amazon which seemed cheapest at $50 shipped...
XP 64?! Dude, that's a dead end OS that MS has abandoned. Vista or Win7 in 64bit is way better if you have to have 64bit but XP 64 is a PITA for drivers and has been since day one....
Curious - what is the difference between the Lifecam H5D-00001 and the LifeCam H5D-00002? both are listed as Cinema but one of them is being listed as "HD". The other still says it can do 720P though so I'm quite confused and finding no help.
I have not used the N, however I HAVE used the Linksys WVC54GCA Wireless G and found it to be EXCELLENT! the only real issue I had was that it's a bit big if you wish to hide it. Vendors still sell enclosures on eBay for them though so it is possible. I've only ever used this indoors but the video works well and I believe there are some capture packages that can handle it, my friend used Securityspy and it was capable of aggregating multiple cameras and could apparently send video to his iPhone using Cam Viewer for SecuritySpy. Way cool IMO but I never got around to setting this up as some of the software was pay for play and I wasn't that interested. I DID buy the G camera refurbished on eBay and it's quite nice and pretty low powered too, you could likely run it off a LiPo battery pack for awhile. IMO the N camera would work just as well as the G, probably the same hardware except radio. What would be REALLy nice is to hack the firmware for more features:-)
I'd LOVE to get this working with say ZoneMinder and be able to still forward vid to an iPhone though so hopefully others have ideas:-) ZoneMinder sounds awesome but I've just not had the time to set it up and I'm not sure this hardware would work.
Last but not least for a CHEAP USB type setup look at Dorgem for Windows. It will monitor the cam and look for changes in the scene and take pics. I have used this to monitor my home and it works well although shadows and sunlight can screw it up. Free and easy to use with a webcam though. The new Microsoft cams are pretty high def and would work well with this IMO...
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I've had zero issues running BD rips compressed over my 100meg cables. I only upgraded the one because I moved a server down there and the speeds plummeted until I got GigE setup to it. No buffering or anything when I've played movies and my stuff is pretty high bitrate too!
The unRAID folks like the Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 cards. I have one but have yet to use it or the two 2TB drives I bought with it. NEVER buy drives till you are nearly out of space! Might be a good price but if you cannot use it right away hold off, prices keep dropping...
That card handles 8 drives but no RAID which is perfect. NewEgg sells it for $100ish I think. Comes with cables too which is nice. Check the unRAID forums for more hardware deals like that - we're always on the hunt for cheap drives and good SATA hardware...
An upgrade for me goes like this... Buy new drive. When drive arrives decide depending on size if it will become my new parity drive or a new data drive. It will become parity if it's bigger than any other drive in the system. Shut down system from web interface. Insert new drive. Power up drive and tell system to either format drive or build parity depending on purpose. Wait, Wait some more. When done all is good!
Now, I do not have access to all drives as a single volume. I can access them as shares or as separate disks or both ways actually. Hard to explain but my upgrade really is THAT easy. And I have done it MANY times. In fact I have also swapped motherboards with no issue! Swapped from IDE to SATA with a bit more trouble - I had to copy files over. Did that with Midnight Commander in an SSH session so it didn't have to come across the wire. If you had good luck with the FreeNAS you'll LOVE unRAID!
Dude seriously? For a HOME system? Hot spares and striped data?! No thanks. I'll risk losing two drives so long as it doesn't effect the rest of my data and in my system it doesn't. I also want to be able to use standard tools to recover the drives if corruption occurs - I can do that with my system which has ReiserFS on the drives.
FWIW I have not had issues with drives bought at the same time failing - not yet anyway. However it IS a good idea to use a Sharpie to put the install date on the case so you know how old they are for warranty purposes. I actually have a damned Seagate now that their tools say is bad but their database doesn't recognize and I know it's under warranty - grrr! Failed in my Tivo of all things! Not had a failure in either NAS in about 2+ years.
Just remember this is for a HOME type system. With that much hardware you won't need to turn the heat on in the Winter!
Still not enough SATA ports though. I need 16+...
No not so complex as you make it sound -> http://www.lime-technology.com/ and you can build one yourself if you choose. Don't use USB and DO have something to protect it but I don't like normal RAID for this - too power and space hungry.
I've got room for 30TB of data storage in two machines for a total of 60TB. However I have only populated them to around 12TB right now, I don't add drives till I'm out of space! :-) Not what I would call massive yet but getting there!
In fact a friend of mine DID! His Drobo fucked up so often he nearly threw it out a window! He pinged me one night raging about it yet again. I told him to head for Fry's and when he got back with $600 worth of hardware he was good to go. His hardware booted unRAID luckily and when he was done and the parity all setup and the disks built he had a solid system that replaced TWO Drobo for $600. Sold his Drobo to folks on Amazon and was ahead in the money dept! The software he's running will support 15 data drives same as mine and I've got two of them. I see zero point in owning the Drobo, too much money for the hardware and the headaches. Took me years to get him off that crap and he is way happier now!
The only issue I see with that is in order to access any of your data all drives must be spinning - that's a waste of power. This is caused by data being striped. What happens to your data if two drives die at once? Or three? Do you lose it all or just those drives? Can you use standard recovery software on the drives?
IMO SATA is fine, ZFS looks interesting but I'm happy already.
That's a waste of drive space. The system I use puts parity on one drive, the OS on a USB, and the rest of the drives are standard format drives that can be mounted under Linux should I need to try data recovery (ReiserFS). Data is not stored redundantly and I can use any size drive I want so long as the Parity drive is bigger or of equal size. With 16 2TB drives I get 30TB worth of storage per server...
unRAID - worth looking into at least. Won't have some of the ability of the Home Server to run apps on it but it's an appliance for storing video and doesn't have the fat OS install either.
Correct, 5400drives are fine for viewing 1080P video and actually so is 100meg ethernet but transferring data is slow so go GigE. Consumer NAS are indeed junk, a friend just emo-raged and pitched two Drobo onto Amazon's sales board. He stormed down to Fry's and bought $600 worth of hardware and drives to build an unRAID and is now quite happy with his new appliance that no longer needs care and feeding nor smokes interfaces. ATOM systems can be done but finding a board with enough slots and enough SATA is near impossible for a large system :-( Use a normal mobo and underclock a Celeron or AMD CPU and you'll be fine so long as you choose a reaosnable PSU that's "green". Big tower is a good idea and use the drive trays that lay drives on their side, I use SuperMicro units and can get 5 drives where 3 would normally fit.
I have two of these servers now. Each server can hold as many as 16 disks (possibly more actually as the programmer keeps bumping that up) with one disk reserved for parity. Data is NOT striped and parity is ONLY stored on the one drive. If a disk fails I lose no data, if two fail I lose two disks of data but nothing else. No hot spares or any other crap. If a disk isn't being used it goes to sleep and saves me heat and power. Disks can be ANY size but the parity disk must be as big or bigger than any of the data disks. Runs on a pretty decent selection of hardware although keeping the list of what works and what doesn't up to date is apparently tough since hardware changes so fast. It's Linux based but pay for play, yes he's followed the GPL. It's not super expensive and it boots from a USB drive to be web administered. I use full tower cases with SuperMicro 5n1 trays, 2gig of memory, Celeron CPU, power saving PSU, and supported mobo that have onboard video and GigE which you WILL need.
Their forums are a big help and active, users are working to expand the capabilities of these NAS and the programmer is working on making that easier too. Check it out, I've not found anything better yet and with some of the newer versions of SAMBA in the code it's pretty fast too! Perfect for a HTPC but not so great for a big transactional database
http://www.lime-technology.com/
There are some performance flashes that can be done in a demo mode that go back to normal performance after XX hours of driving but other than that I've never heard of a timed or triggered kind of thing being done. That would take extra ordinary access to the code and most flashes just modify tables for lookups. Even that is tough since the damned firmware is encrypted by most every automaker! Making this worse would really piss me off, these guys are not understanding what they are talking about IMO. Yes, the systems are integrated on a CAN BUS, they did it for a good reason, stop bitching! The last thing we need is OBD being trashed for "security" so no one can fix the cars...
The auto industry ALREADY encrypts the daylights out of most of their code! Which makes modifying it for performance reasons a PITA. I have to pay some guy a pile of cash to "flash" my current ECU because only a few guys have managed to figure out the code for it unlike with other cars. Duh, it's a computer and it controls things so yes it can be messed with.But the auto industry already encrypts it and makes this difficult. So long as the auto dealers are able to modify things like speedometers and other things this will always be a "threat" so stop running around like Chicken Little. Sheesh! What they should turn off the OBD-II standard codes so no one but a dealer can diagnose and make minor changes to cars? See how SEMA will like that and all of the independent garages and shade tree mechanics. then they will bitch that it's too locked down. Make up your minds and stop being so short sighted...
Umm, I run XBMC and have for quite some time. I do usually use a remote but when I want to use a mouse I have no issues. In fact with a new skin I'm currently using the mouse right-click is the only way I've found to update source libraries. the mouse works fine! Now, it might not work while displaying a DVD menu as I've honestly not tried it. I guess I don't understand why you want a mouse so badly.
HDMI is treated like a DVI output.A DVI output that also supports sound etc. - it's all I've ever use don my setup. I'm on those forums too so by all means ding me if I can be of help. I'm no Linux pro though but I have managed to achieve great success with XBMC. Wish I could say the same for Myth. Currently I extract from a Tivo HD with KMTTG and torrent for TV.
Funny, I couldn't name a baseball player if you paid me, don't watch "reality" TV, and could care less about fashion. Some of my coworkers may care about it and sometimes the topics come up but we all get along just fine and treat one another as equals - something you probably don't understand. No loss here at all.
Our team works well together, we support one another solving problems, and we're quite productive without prima donnas on staff. You on the other hand seem to be one of those sorts that just wants requirements slipped under the door and no interaction. You wouldn't fit in nor last long in our environment, or that of any other place I've worked - or would care to work.
I realize you think you're an asset but honestly you're closer to an ass and sound pretty maladjusted. You look down on others from your high horse and point at the "lemmings" as if somehow superior; truly it's you who are losing in more ways than you realize. Folks don't laugh with you, they laugh at you. Thankfully I know you won't be getting past the front door and into my workspace any time soon.
Good luck to you.
Places of work are also social havens. People who can talk and find common ground often work well together. When I and others interview people to join our team we also interview their social skills to see if they will fit. If someone walked in the door with your attitude it would be a very short interview!
Yup and taking way longer to do it I'm sure. I've not got a clock ticking off deadlines for me or anything but when I did Watchmen for my HTPC and it took near 24hours to compress I nearly had a cow! Obviously I go for very high quality and max size compression and I also want to be able to use my computer for other things. 2cores just wasn't enough even overclocked sky high. 4cores made a huge difference, 6 would be even better. the Hyperthreading is icing on the cake! My current machine even beats CUDA implementations that only use the graphics card and I get way more flexibility on profiles and filters. If the Intel CPU weren't so expensive I'd own one now. If the AMD could prove itself better than my existing crazy setup I'd sure consider it if the price were right...
Video compression is my excuse - I'm tempted to buy the Intel 6core actually! I currently run a 4 core I7, with Hyperthreading I see 8 cores and I max that out 100% for hours at a time compressing HD video. Yes, the pseudo cores help. I went from 24 hour sessions on some movies to under 4 hours just by moving to this CPU. Additional instruction sets, 8 cores, and 4.2ghz vs my previous 2 core 3.2ghz are all responsible. this puppy is water cooled and still hits 82degress Celsius! Would I take more cores? Hell's yes! Would I want to move to an AMD 6core vs the Intel.... I dunno'. I will look at the benchmarks but my gut says no that it wouldn't be much of a help. I know that an Intel quad core running slower than my dual still sped things up but this I7 920 screams and with AMD's general lack of performance lately I'm not sure even another 2 cores would match it. I guess the benchmarks will tell.
Oh and not this isn't a profession or a job just something I do for my HTPC. I do it often enough that I want it faster too! Shows recorded on my DVR, BluRay, and other sources all provide grist for this particular CPU :-)
Nice, no reason this is rated so low! I do notice that there are several LiveCam Cinemas out there - any idea what the differences are? Is it just the market that changes the model number? I see them ending in 0001 and 0002 and 0003 from Dell. Weird! Some are listed as "HD" but all seem to support the same 720P. I've ordered a 0002 model from Amazon which seemed cheapest at $50 shipped...
XP 64?! Dude, that's a dead end OS that MS has abandoned. Vista or Win7 in 64bit is way better if you have to have 64bit but XP 64 is a PITA for drivers and has been since day one....
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.22789
200ft $18 :-)
Curious - what is the difference between the Lifecam H5D-00001 and the LifeCam H5D-00002? both are listed as Cinema but one of them is being listed as "HD". The other still says it can do 720P though so I'm quite confused and finding no help.
I have not used the N, however I HAVE used the Linksys WVC54GCA Wireless G and found it to be EXCELLENT! the only real issue I had was that it's a bit big if you wish to hide it. Vendors still sell enclosures on eBay for them though so it is possible. I've only ever used this indoors but the video works well and I believe there are some capture packages that can handle it, my friend used Securityspy and it was capable of aggregating multiple cameras and could apparently send video to his iPhone using Cam Viewer for SecuritySpy. Way cool IMO but I never got around to setting this up as some of the software was pay for play and I wasn't that interested. I DID buy the G camera refurbished on eBay and it's quite nice and pretty low powered too, you could likely run it off a LiPo battery pack for awhile. IMO the N camera would work just as well as the G, probably the same hardware except radio. What would be REALLy nice is to hack the firmware for more features :-)
I'd LOVE to get this working with say ZoneMinder and be able to still forward vid to an iPhone though so hopefully others have ideas :-) ZoneMinder sounds awesome but I've just not had the time to set it up and I'm not sure this hardware would work.
Last but not least for a CHEAP USB type setup look at Dorgem for Windows. It will monitor the cam and look for changes in the scene and take pics. I have used this to monitor my home and it works well although shadows and sunlight can screw it up. Free and easy to use with a webcam though. The new Microsoft cams are pretty high def and would work well with this IMO...