RAID setup?

[curt_gendron]

I'm actually in the process of doing something similar. I have a movie collection of around 7 TB. I have been using a super old PC running Windows Home Server and using there duplication feature. So I have around 16TB of drives in all different sizes. I've had a few disk failures over the years, but with the duplication, I haven't lost anything yet.

But I'm not really happy with Windows Home Server. Doesn't seem to really fit my needs. I'm building a new server that will run on freeNAS. I'm planning on using 4 x 3TB drives in a Raid 5 setup. I'm going to use the RaidZ software raid that is part of the freeNAS operating system. Once I get everything copied over (which will probably take weeks) then I'll rip apart the old server and use some of those drives to make an additional backup on.

Storing blu-ray rips can chew up a lot of space, but I'm also not happy with most of the compressed blu-ray copies I've seen. Even an 8GB compressed blu-ray movie still looks like crap to me. I want the best quality possible for my movies, so I leave them uncompressed. And hence I'm stuck dealing with all this space.

I also have about 70 HD-DVDs in my collection. I still wish they would of won the format war, but oh well. LOL As long as I can find software to run them, I'm gonna watch them.

I'm still in the early stages of building this new server, I'll report back when I'm done.

later,
Curt

[JET]

What are you using to play the movies on other TV's Curt?

[curt_gendron]

What are you using to play the movies on other TV's Curt?

I have a computer in my living room that I play movies on. Its a Windows 7 machine. I use Windows Media Center on there. I have a plugin called Media Browser, which catalogs all the movies. Within Media Browser I use Media Player Classic to actually play the movies.

All of my blu rays are ripped into mkv files. With Media Player Classic configured correctly, it plays the blu rays (MKVs) better than most blu ray players. Its a pretty complicated setup, but I like it.

later,
Curt

[JET]

That is the same setup I have in the living room, it works pretty slick. I love the SSD too, it took 18 seconds off the boot time.

[curt_gendron]

I do have my freeNAS server up and running. I'm working on copying over my 7.1 TB of data too it.

So far I really like freeNAS. If your main function of having a server is for huge amounts of data storage, I think this is the way to go.

[bramagedained]

Speaking of drivers, I bought a couple of 3TB drives, and took all the non-OS drives out of my desktop.

http://i63.photobucket.com/albums/h144/Bramage/IMAG0071_zpsb410fa3b.jpg

I decided I'm going to go buy some cheap hardware to put in my other case to just setup a simple file server.

[scheides]

I decided I'm going to go buy some cheap hardware to put in my other case to just setup a simple file server.


No no no you're doing it wrong! Upgrade your main rig and use the legacy parts for the fileserver :)

[Murlo26]

No no no you're doing it wrong! Upgrade your main rig and use the legacy parts for the fileserver :)

This...thats what i do.

[bramagedained]

No no no you're doing it wrong! Upgrade your main rig and use the legacy parts for the fileserver :)

Haha. I can't justify that, the cost to upgrade my gaming rig to use the current stuff as a server would be high.

[dsmolition]

Gigabytes and stuff