View Full Version : Where is the best place to store my 500+ movie collection?
ethan_9219
2009-01-19, 05:27
Hi,
Let me say firstly i'm pretty sure this is not the place to ask this question, so if anybody might be able to tell me where i will definitely repost in the appropriate area.
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At the moment all my movies are on DVDs sitting on the shelves. However, i am wanting to build an HTPC to have all my movies in one spot.
So, i'm guessing i will need about 4 or 5 terabytes (assuming i rip only the movie, with subtitles, and no compression) with the option to upgrade the space in the future.
I don't think i can really turn my old PC into a server or NAS or anything as it and the HTPC will be at complete opposite ends of the house.
I'm guessing there's no way to build a 5tb External Hard Drive or anything like that?
Any help would be greatly appreciated as, frankly, i'm at a complete loss.
Regards,
Ethan
magician2009
2009-01-19, 05:38
[QUOTE=ethan_9219;271849]Hi,
Let me say firstly i'm pretty sure this is not the place to ask this question, so if anybody might be able to tell me where i will definitely repost in the appropriate area.
-------
At the moment all my movies are on DVDs sitting on the shelves. However, i am wanting to build an HTPC to have all my movies in one spot.
So, i'm guessing i will need about 4 or 5 terabytes (assuming i rip only the movie, with subtitles, and no compression) with the option to upgrade the space in the future.
I don't think i can really turn my old PC into a server or NAS or anything as it and the HTPC will be at complete opposite ends of the house.
There are several home based nas devices that are resonable. I have used the netgear nas100 with (3) 1.5tb drives. It worked decent however I have found that if you have several devices pulling for them they get picky. I ended up adding (6) 1.5 tb drives to my esx server and installing freenas. I have my drives in a raid 0/1 config with 4.8TB usable.
What format are you taking you movies to? 500 movies to 5tb seems like alot.
bond007taz
2009-01-19, 06:28
get a NAS and use DVDfab to back up your movies to the NAS - i use the thecus n5200 and I have about 5 xbmc boxes around the house to view the movies
SlaveUnit
2009-01-19, 06:43
I also use DVDfab to make iso files from my DVDs. I run a 10TB (12 drives) array with software called unRAID. Its a very flexible system. The os runs linux and the app from a thumb drive. Easy to add new drives of any size and type. Its not free but in my opinion well worth it
http://lime-technology.com/
BlackBox
2009-01-19, 07:09
How fast is the NAS, wired, n-draft?
Thanks for results :)
Blackbox
Ok sorry to say this but to give you a good answer more info is needed. Due to the fact there are a zillion options for you.
What is you budget?
Be more specific with what you want (we know 5TB). Do you want redundancy, if so how much? Ease of use? Cheap? Expandability? Separate server or can you add a box like thing next to your PC? Do you want to build or want to buy?
Other then the options mentioned you could look into an external enclosure that you plug into your PC...
http://www.cwol.com/serial-ata/sata-drive-enclosures.htm
I'd personally use AutoMKV (http://automkv.a.wiki-site.com/index.php/Help:Contents) to convert them to a much smaller file size while keeping the quality.
alessio2
2009-01-19, 12:07
Don't forget it will took some time too!
If you make 10 conversions every week (in average) it will take you a whole year for all movies you have on DVD :sniffle:
ethan_9219
2009-01-19, 12:10
Hi,
Thanks everyone for the quick replies so far. All your advice is valuable.
Ok, so to clarify things and give a bit more info and details;
I am planning on ripping my movies with DVDFab HD Decrypter with no compression. And i have just calculated the size of each movie at about 7GB, which i know is probably above the average, but i want to be sure i have enough space for subsequent rips for a while.
To be clear, i am ripping only the main movie, and no menus or special features. So, knowing this would it be best for me to rip with DVDFab to a folder containing VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders, or straight to ISO format?
So, with that 7GB per movie figure, i estimated that my 586 movies would equal about 4.1TB. Which will leave me with a little space before needing to add more space.
As for price, i'm not really sure as i've got no idea what any of all this would cost. So, for now, let's say i don't really have a budget, until i learn more and here some more opinions.
How much do 1TB drives cost? are 1.5TB drives available?
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So, hopefully, i have now provided a little more info.
As for data protection, i would want to know my movies are safe, but i'm not sure if i could afford it. What sorts of protection are available and what RAID configurations?
I wouldn't be at all opposed to a box-like thing next to my PC or an external enclosure plugged into the PC, so long as it wasn't very loud. The problem is that my lounge room is very small, so any unnecessary noise is easily heard.
Thanks again everyone
keithskaggs
2009-01-19, 13:17
I have a NAS that I built from scraps. The processor is an old Athlon XP 2200+ running FreeNAS with 4 x 320 GB HDs and 256 MB RAM, booting from a 128 MB thumb drive. It's very easy to convert an old system to run FreeNAS but some things to consider:
1. Noise and heat - my NAS has 4 loud cooling fans and the 4 PATA HDs put out a lot of heat. I moved it to my garage where it has been running for almost a year now without problem (ran all summer through the Florida heat in un-airconditioned space).
2. Speed - not so much for streaming (even HD will stream over a wired 100 MB connection) but copying data to it can be slow without Gigabit ethernet. For instance, without Gigabit ethernet a 1.6 GB XVID movie could take 7 or 8 minutes to move to the NAS. An HD rip of 8 GB would take 40 to 50 minutes. However, with a 5 port Gigabit switch in my entertainment center (NAS is in the garage 15 ft and 1 wall away) and a 5 port Gigabit switch in my den (my main PC, router, Server, about 50 feet from entertainment center) I can transfer 1.6 GB in less than 2 minutes and 8 Gb in about 9 minutes. Note: I have a Gigabit ethernet card in my NAS and my main PC.
3. Drive size/type. The largest PATA drives are 750 GB (expensive and rare) while SATA drives currently go up to 1.5 TB. With 6 SATA 1.5 TB drives you would get 9 TB of un RAIDed storage or 7.5 TB of RAID 5 storage.
4. RAID - If all you are saving is a collection of rips of DVDs that you own, why waste the space on RAID? I have my 4 drives set as JBOD and if I loose a drive, I loose 1/4 of my movie collection. So what, I'll just re-rip whatever I lost from my DVDs. If on the other hand I have personal stuff that is not easily replacable, then a RAID setup is necessary.
5. What type of HD (PATA or SATA) and how many HDs does my system support? You can combine PATA and SATA drives in your FreeNAS but RAID will only work with same size/interface drives. Also be aware that drives use a lot of power so be prepared to replace the power supply with something larger (typical older systems came with 300 - 400 watt PS but 6 HDs would probably require a 500 watt or larger PS).
Regardless, if you build your own or buy one, NAS is the way to go. It can be hung anywhere on your network (even in the garage) and if it gets full just build or buy another to add to your network. There is practically no maintenance with a NAS. Mine has been running for ove two years and I have rebooted only twice in the last year. XBMC easily supports multiple locations for your media and seamlessly presents them to you in the Library mode. A friend even uses a Windows Home Server setup as a NAS in his garage. The WD ShareSpace WDA4NC20000 NAS server comes with 1 to 4 TB installed and seems like the ideal NAS but I would have to play with one before recommending it (kinda pricy too).
Well, that's my two cents.
Keith
Just fyi I have 380 movies ripped at full quality (only the main movie + 5.1/DTS track) is kept. My NAS currently is sitting at 2.13 TB and I have a ton of apps, games and mp3s on there as well (30Gb of MP3s alone).
As for ripping to ISO or TS_Video folders... TS_Video folders a little bit more flexible with others systems and players (aka not XBMC), though XBMC only supports ISO format for TV Series rips... So I would say if you plan to use XBMC and have no real plan to switch in the future its safe to rip to ISO. TS_Video can be only beneficial to a small amount of players and front ends, since many support ISO but even if they don't there usually is a work around to mount ISOs....
Now as someone said with 500 movies it will take a while to rip all those movies... If you want to invest you could buy some cheap DVD drives and run multiple instances of which ever apps you are to use for ripping.
You could use AnyDVD + DVDShrink + Multi-Shrink (http://www.dvdshrink.info/chetwood/) to do this. Works pretty good.
You said you wanted to use DeFab but I am not sure if you can run multiple instances....
How much do 1TB drives cost? are 1.5TB drives available?
-------
So, hopefully, i have now provided a little more info.
As for data protection, i would want to know my movies are safe, but i'm not sure if i could afford it. What sorts of protection are available and what RAID configurations?
I wouldn't be at all opposed to a box-like thing next to my PC or an external enclosure plugged into the PC, so long as it wasn't very loud. The problem is that my lounge room is very small, so any unnecessary noise is easily heard.1.5TB drives are available. Seagate does them. Avoid them at all costs. I bought three and I will have to RMA all three of them. Similar horror stories abound on the internet (and please, if others have working drives, consider that ethan might just avoid the risk and be safe).
If this is something you plan on keeping turned on 24/7, I would consider something Atom based, with 1TB WD Green drives. That would be quiet and offer you energy savings every month.
Regarding the protection... people have suggested UnRAID. It's a nice solution, but it comes at a cost and runs on a dedicated Linux install. You might want to look at FlexRAID (http://www.openegg.org/FlexRAID.curi) which is not realtime but for media purposes it's plenty enough (considering that on a dedicated machine you can schedule tasks for the night, resynching everything). Although, to be honest, I don't know how performance could be if you decide to go the Atom way (otherwise, you could consider the Celeron E1200 dual core).
Both UnRAID and FlexRAID adopt the same parity based redundancy. Basically, you have to dedicate one drive to the parity data and it has to be as large as the largest of the data carrying drives. It then gives you fault tolerance for a single unity failure and, in case more than one drive fails, you lose only the data on the drives that failed. You can mix and match drives sizes which could be handy. Also, with this approach you can set hard drives to sleep after a certain amount of time and save energy.
RAID-5 gives you the same fault tolerance (ie. one unit) but if two or more units fail you lose everything. Also, RAID-5 needs all the drives to be spinning when data is accessed, meaning energy savings are tough to obtain.
smcnally75
2009-01-19, 20:34
...though XBMC only supports ISO format for TV Series rips...
Not true...I have TV Series rips separated by episode that are AVI and it sees/plays them just fine.
smcnally75
2009-01-19, 20:37
So, with that 7GB per movie figure...
A standard DVD (Main movie only) is actually only 3GB-5GB
ethan_9219
2009-01-20, 04:31
A standard DVD (Main movie only) is actually only 3GB-5GB
Okay, well that's good to know. I guess i just wanted to over-compensate with my 7GB figure so that i didn't end up with too little space.
1.5TB drives are available. Seagate does them. Avoid them at all costs. I bought three and I will have to RMA all three of them. Similar horror stories abound on the internet (and please, if others have working drives, consider that ethan might just avoid the risk and be safe).
If this is something you plan on keeping turned on 24/7, I would consider something Atom based, with 1TB WD Green drives. That would be quiet and offer you energy savings every month.
Okay, so i guess i won't use 1.5TB Seagate drives. Does anybody recommend any particular 1TB drives, preferrably cheap-ish, though i would pay for quality.
There is a high possibility that i will need the hard drives to be always on, so yes noise and power consumption is an issue.
So I would say if you plan to use XBMC and have no real plan to switch in the future its safe to rip to ISO.
Yes, i plan on using only XBMC, so i guess i will rip all movies and TV shows to ISO format.
Now as someone said with 500 movies it will take a while to rip all those movies... If you want to invest you could buy some cheap DVD drives and run multiple instances of which ever apps you are to use for ripping.
You could use AnyDVD + DVDShrink + Multi-Shrink (http://www.dvdshrink.info/chetwood/) to do this. Works pretty good.
You said you wanted to use DeFab but I am not sure if you can run multiple instances....
I know it will take a while, but i'm a high school student here in Australia and currently we are on school break, so i'm pretty much free through the day. My brother and i have two PCs and three laptops to work with, so i figure we will try and aim for 5 movies per machine, per day. So, hopefully i will be able to get it done in under a month.
1. Noise and heat - my NAS has 4 loud cooling fans and the 4 PATA HDs put out a lot of heat. I moved it to my garage where it has been running for almost a year now without problem (ran all summer through the Florida heat in un-airconditioned space).
Okay. I guess i would need to find somewhere to put it that the noise won't be distracting.
3. Drive size/type. The largest PATA drives are 750 GB (expensive and rare) while SATA drives currently go up to 1.5 TB. With 6 SATA 1.5 TB drives you would get 9 TB of un RAIDed storage or 7.5 TB of RAID 5 storage.
What exactly is RAID 5? I mean, what sort of protection does it offer?
4. RAID - If all you are saving is a collection of rips of DVDs that you own, why waste the space on RAID? I have my 4 drives set as JBOD and if I loose a drive, I loose 1/4 of my movie collection. So what, I'll just re-rip whatever I lost from my DVDs. If on the other hand I have personal stuff that is not easily replacable, then a RAID setup is necessary.
Well, that JBOD sounds like a reasonable idea. But, i don't know if i want the hassle of re-ripping a quarter of my movie collection.
As for my personal stuff, i guess i could nearly store it all on an external HDD separate from my movies, music and TV shows.
Regardless, if you build your own or buy one, NAS is the way to go. It can be hung anywhere on your network (even in the garage) and if it gets full just build or buy another to add to your network. There is practically no maintenance with a NAS. Mine has been running for ove two years and I have rebooted only twice in the last year. XBMC easily supports multiple locations for your media and seamlessly presents them to you in the Library mode. A friend even uses a Windows Home Server setup as a NAS in his garage. The WD ShareSpace WDA4NC20000 NAS server comes with 1 to 4 TB installed and seems like the ideal NAS but I would have to play with one before recommending it (kinda pricy too).
Well, im thinking NAS sounds like a good idea, and even though i hear the term being thrown around a lot, i can't really make sense of what it actually is. So, what does it mean, that i have to buy a separate PC and use as a server or something? or how does it work?
Please forgive the newbie question, i'm still trying to wrap my head around it all.
Ethan
ethan_9219
2009-01-20, 12:05
anyone?
Not true...I have TV Series rips separated by episode that are AVI and it sees/plays them just fine.
That may be but I don't think it supports Video_Ts folders... at least not like it does with movies.
I had to rerip my episodes to iso from video_ts in order for it to work.
RAID 5: This is a combination of drives (3 or more) that provides for data protection if 1 drive fails. If 2 drives fail (at the same time or during rebuild) ALL data is lost. All drives must be the same size or larger (though the extra space on larger drives is unused). 1 disk of space is always used for protection... if you have 4 1TB drives you would only have 3TB of usable space.
This scheme also spreads all data to all disks. Say you have a 1GB file and a 4 disk RAID 5 array.... When you copy the 1GB file to the RAID 5 it will store 250mb of the file on each of the 4 disks + some parity data. So when you read a file from the RAID 5 all drives will have to "spin" up.
There are 2 basic forms of RAID.... Software where the computer cpu does all the calculations for parity and hardware, where the RAID card has a processor and the computer doesn't have to do much. Hardware is generally much more expensive.
RAID 6: Pretty much the same thing as RAID 5 except it uses 2 disks for parity and can recover from a 2 disk failure. This is suggested for larger disk arrays like 8+...
NAS: Well in terms of this thread it is basically a RAID system attached to the network. I generally only talk about store bought systems as NAS, like infrant or Thecus solutions. But you can build your own NAS device from a spare computer using linux... Generally a NAS is a single propose device... it only stores data on the network rather then a server with RAID which can run multiple services besides file storage.
Gamester17
2009-01-20, 18:11
@ethan_9219, ALWAYS wait at least 24-hours before bumping a thread! Please read: http://xbmc.org/wiki/?title=XBMC_Forum_FAQ#What_is_netiquette.2C_and_wh at_is_the_standard_code_of_conduct.3F
There are a lot of options. I guess it boils down to personal choice and what you want to achieve.
Dankirk's suggestion of Anydvd+DVDShrink+Multishrink is very good. I like ISO format because it gives you one file to play with and they start much faster through xbmc than ifo/vob's (using xbox). You can always pull ifo/vob's back out with DVDshrink (Which also lets you write direct to ISO). If you want to save space, cut off the credits.
I went unRAID. While it's not free, it isn't expensive either. It's runs off a USB drive. Their forum is great and offers a lot of support.
The basic version of unRAID (1xparity+2xData drives) is free - giving you 3Tb if you use SG1.5tb drives (not a good idea currently because of their firmware problems). Expanding the array (adding more space) is simple. Can be managed directly from the server, or via a windows/Linux PC.
Hope this helps.