| Author |
Message |
    
Newstead
Citizen
Username: Newstead77
Post Number: 27
Registered: 9-2004
| | Posted on Friday, January 13, 2006 - 2:24 pm: |     |
I was thinking of storing my movie collection on a hard drive, with the intention of having all movies/pictures/music available through Windows Media Center or the upcoming Vista release.
Since each movie is approximately 4-8 gb, even the largest hard drives available (approximately 400 gb) would run out of space fairly quickly.
Are there any inexpensive options which I could use hook several hard drives togther, or some other way of getting vast amounts of storage which can be expanded as needed.
Thanks,
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Dave
Supporter
Username: Dave
Post Number: 8380
Registered: 4-1997
| | Posted on Friday, January 13, 2006 - 2:32 pm: | |
Stack a few of these.
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10727 |
Rastro
Citizen
Username: Rastro
Post Number: 2190
Registered: 5-2004
| | Posted on Friday, January 13, 2006 - 2:38 pm: | |
There are also enclosures that are essentially drive cages with a network card.
You could also get a very cheap, used computer, and throw in as many hard drives as you can fit. Drives are cheap, and a file server does not need a fast processor - just a fast network card. With the right OS and network card, you can even make multiple physical drives appear as a single network drive. |
JMF
Citizen
Username: Jmf
Post Number: 228
Registered: 9-2004
| | Posted on Friday, January 13, 2006 - 2:43 pm: | |
You can daisy chain Firewire drives together... I think the number is 67... but you can expand as you need more fairly easily.
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Newstead
Citizen
Username: Newstead77
Post Number: 28
Registered: 9-2004
| | Posted on Friday, January 13, 2006 - 2:44 pm: | |
Dave,
Thanks - this is along the lines of what I was looking for, but this seems somewhat expensive at $429 for 500 gb.
Would there be any way to stack a bunch of IDE drives - which I can buy a 320 gb drive for about $120?
Regards,
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Newstead
Citizen
Username: Newstead77
Post Number: 29
Registered: 9-2004
| | Posted on Friday, January 13, 2006 - 2:49 pm: | |
Rastro - I think that would work, but then I would be limited to the number of drive bays in the computer - which is probably around 5.
JMF - when you daisy chain Firewire drives together, do they show up as one drive for the operating system or does each get its own letter?
Thanks |
Tom Reingold
Supporter
Username: Noglider
Post Number: 11951
Registered: 1-2003
| | Posted on Friday, January 13, 2006 - 2:52 pm: | |
It depends on your budget and what you want to do. Why do you want to do this in the first place? Hard disks crash, so it's not a good idea to do this if you want to get rid of the original media. It's also expensive if you're doing it so you don't have to get out of your seat to change the disk.
But the sky is the limit. Here at work, we have servers that cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and provide dozens of terabytes. Of course, the purpose is quite different than yours.
And if you're getting this many megabytes, the likelihood of a crash increases and the cost thereof increases, too, so you should use a RAID-5 system, with many (at least three) disks working in tandem. RAID uses redundancy and striping so that if one drive fails, you don't lose any data. You can replace the failed drive, and the system rebuilds the redundant data. If the system is built well, all of this can happen without your system being down for a moment. But this increases your cost-per-byte ratio.
So again, what are you hoping to do?
One very interesting product is the Linksys NLSU-2 which is a file server that sits on your network, into which you plug one or two USB hard disks. The unit costs only $80. It runs Linux (though they don't want you to know that), and there are ways of breaking in and modifying it and turning it into a general purpose computer.
Feel free to contact me if you want more information or explanation on any of this.
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Case
Citizen
Username: Case
Post Number: 993
Registered: 2-2005
| | Posted on Friday, January 13, 2006 - 2:57 pm: | |
If you're really serious about this, you might want to consider building a large tower server. I built one recently and used primarily 250GB drives; combined with a few smaller PCs in the house I currently run a little over 2TB of storage for movies and TV shows... but half of that is backup. Backup is REALLY important!
If you want to discuss it over the phone, feel free to shoot me a PL and we can set up a chat.
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Rastro
Citizen
Username: Rastro
Post Number: 2194
Registered: 5-2004
| | Posted on Friday, January 13, 2006 - 3:35 pm: | |
Tom is right. First step back and decide what you want to accomplish, what your requirements are, and what your budget is. Then we can go from there... |
Newstead
Citizen
Username: Newstead77
Post Number: 30
Registered: 9-2004
| | Posted on Friday, January 13, 2006 - 3:42 pm: | |
Tom/Case,
Thanks for the advice.
My goal is to have all my movies/music/pictures available for playback at the touch of a button via Windows Media Center or Vista on a TV or a PC screen - for personal use.
I understand the advantages of RAID - however, given that I will have all my media already backed up on DVD discs, so even if the whole system crashes, while inconvenient, will not be catastrophic.
It looks as if tower solution Case mentioned might be along the lines of what I was thinking - something inexpensive which can be expanded as needed.
Regards, |
Newstead
Citizen
Username: Newstead77
Post Number: 31
Registered: 9-2004
| | Posted on Friday, January 13, 2006 - 3:57 pm: | |
I forgot to add that regarding my budget ... I was trying to understand what the options were before selecting a product. Since this is for personal use, my budget would not be in the thousands of dollars, but probably around $1000 - $1500.
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Case
Citizen
Username: Case
Post Number: 996
Registered: 2-2005
| | Posted on Friday, January 13, 2006 - 4:05 pm: | |
We can do that. I put together a pretty good system at newegg.com; my criteria was plenty of IDE and SATA ports on the motherboard, on-board RAID and a case that you could hide a small child in.
Granted, in tests the child didn't do all that well inside the tower... but other than that it was a complete success.
The only thing that might blow the budget is a kickass video card - we may be able to upgrade your existing computer with that, leaving the server to... well... be a server.
I'll shoot you a private message and we can chat a bit. Its a fun project! |
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