Building a media server help! Please..

Mr Big

Mr Big

Mr Big

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Hi! It is only wee me here again. I have another thread which was about how to go about building a media server and you all answered with very informative replies and going by those replies I'm ordering stuff as we speak. I thank you all for that. So I will keep this question short.

Simply put: When I build my media server with say 6 hard drives installed at the same time, will I be able to add hard drives say in 5 months a year or two years time to increase the capacity of my server when needed as I have room for a further 10 HDD. I know I will need the drives to be the same capacity in size and matching brand name so will I be able to add more drives in the future or have they to be installed all at the same time configured and left to do it's thing?

Interesting times folks, with blu ray and that big old screen and full speaker set up I tell ya makes the local multiplex sound crap by comparison, and that's not a word of a lie.. This server is being built to house my blu ray collection streaming it to my Anthem 300 MRX.

I do appreciate all who reply, if you don't get a thank you I apologies in advance, sincerely you will and I do read all the reply's I get they don't go unnoticed so thank you in advance..


Thanks
 
will I be able to add hard drives say in 5 months a year or two years time to increase the capacity of my server when needed
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Sounds like you'll need a lot of SATA ports but you can get PCI SATA cards and port mutlipliers.

I know I will need the drives to be the same capacity in size and matching brand name
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Not at all, add what ever drives you like unless your doing some type of RAID?
 
R088ieS86 said:
Sounds like you'll need a lot of SATA ports but you can get PCI SATA cards and port mutlipliers.



Not at all, add what ever drives you like unless your doing some type of RAID?
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Yes I am doing a raid configuration using the LSI MegaRAID SAS 9240-8i KIT. Thanks for your informative reply.
 
Be sure to make a build log of that. Definitely one of the more eleborate media servers being built at the moment. (mines just an intel G620, 4GB RAM on WHS2011 :D)

Good luck.
 
Nice. I too would be interested in that. My media server is very poor by comparison, being simply a HP microserver running Win7 and PS3 Media Server.
 
R088ieS86 said:
Be sure to make a build log of that. Definitely one of the more eleborate media servers being built at the moment. (mines just an intel G620, 4GB RAM on WHS2011 :D)

Good luck.
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Hi. Yes I will keep a log of the bits and bobs and the build itself and keep you all informed, it is only because of the blu ray that I was thinking massive 40Tb space should be enough for 1150 Blu Ray films at full resolution and all the Hd candy.

I think I will configure a raid 6 this should safeguard in case of two hard drive failures.
 
40TB. Nice one. I thought I was pushing the boat out at 8-10TB.

Can I ask how you are ripping them? And what are you doing with 3D? I have the dilemma whereby I don't really like watching movies in 3D all the time, but do like to do it occasionally. But sometimes I just like to watch in 2D. Problem is that I don't really want to dedicate upto 100 GB on one movie just so I can have it in both 3D and 2D.

I am thinking of going down the route of having some compression on the 2D copy (bringing it down to around 10-12GB), and keeping the 3D in all its glory. It would be interesting to hear the views of someone with a lot more storage than me, to see how they are handling it.

On the other hand, I dont have 1000 BR's. Maybe 80-100 tops...
 
xs2man said:
Nice. I too would be interested in that. My media server is very poor by comparison, being simply a HP microserver running Win7 and PS3 Media Server.
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I think you are knocking your system for what it is, and it is doing a good job my server is a new venture and one which I have never approached before I have spent countless hours reading about all the bits and bobs and the guy's on this forum are the best with advice, without this forum and the people herein my build would not have been possible. So thank you for all your advice you all have made this possible for me to go ahead and have a go at building this server because you have filled in the missing blanks for me with aspects of things I didn't even know I would need..

It sounds kinda overkill but those pesky blu rays take a lot of space and will be great way of displaying artwork picture ratio gees, here are the links so you get a feel as to what I'm talking about with displaying blu ray artwork and film info.

These video players were developed for the dune media players or jukebox's but these video players work very well in a windows environment, if you need any help with playing your files give me a nudge..

This will give you a feel as to what i'm talking about as typing it here can be far better explained if you actually see them in action, follow the links to you tube below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqtA0V-JAZA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmurMqnTIgA
 
Mr Big said:
Yes I am doing a raid configuration using the LSI MegaRAID SAS 9240-8i KIT. Thanks for your informative reply.
Click to expand...
OK... I'm going to be leftfield here, but I wouldn't do that. I would opt for a board with lots of SATA ports, PCI-e expansion so I could add PCI-e SATA HBAs to them and run FreeBSD (or OpenSolaris) with ZFS for the filesystem.

It is cheaper to do than hardware RAID, more fault tolerant (the filesystem metadata is checked and the checksum is kept separately from the data), trivial to expand the storage invisibly to the clients with different sized data pools, and can be checked for filesystem correctness whilst the arrays are online.

The motherboard I'm using is a Sapphire 990FX based one which has 9 onboard SATA-3 ports, 2xPCI-e x16, 2xPCI-e x8, 2xPCI-e x4. I'm currently running 9 HDDs in it - 4 as a RAIDZ (RAID5 config but in software) with 1 hot spare, 2 as mirrored drives, boot drive and a spare 2TB drive for moving data plus a 3.5" hot dock caddy (and SATA based DVD drive ;)). I've also got a couple of Adaptec 1430SA cards in there which means I have 17 SATA ports internally... Running an old AMD 4 core 2.8GHz processor, I can quite happily saturate read and write bandwidths (from memory 220MB/s write, 300+MByte/s read) onto the main disk array without breaking a sweat processor wise and sustain 105+MB/s read or write across Gigabit Ethernet.
 
xs2man said:
40TB. Nice one. I thought I was pushing the boat out at 8-10TB.

Can I ask how you are ripping them? And what are you doing with 3D? I have the dilemma whereby I don't really like watching movies in 3D all the time, but do like to do it occasionally. But sometimes I just like to watch in 2D. Problem is that I don't really want to dedicate upto 100 GB on one movie just so I can have it in both 3D and 2D.

I am thinking of going down the route of having some compression on the 2D copy (bringing it down to around 10-12GB), and keeping the 3D in all its glory. It would be interesting to hear the views of someone with a lot more storage than me, to see how they are handling it.

On the other hand, I dont have 1000 BR's. Maybe 80-100 tops...
Click to expand...

Don't most TVs have 3D-2D option? Mine does. Then you'd only need the 3D versions anyway.
 
xs2man said:
40TB. Nice one. I thought I was pushing the boat out at 8-10TB.

Can I ask how you are ripping them? And what are you doing with 3D? I have the dilemma whereby I don't really like watching movies in 3D all the time, but do like to do it occasionally. But sometimes I just like to watch in 2D. Problem is that I don't really want to dedicate upto 100 GB on one movie just so I can have it in both 3D and 2D.

I am thinking of going down the route of having some compression on the 2D copy (bringing it down to around 10-12GB), and keeping the 3D in all its glory. It would be interesting to hear the views of someone with a lot more storage than me, to see how they are handling it.

On the other hand, I dont have 1000 BR's. Maybe 80-100 tops...
Click to expand...

Hello. Yes you are correct. I do not have hundreds of Blu Rays either at most 25 at the moment but this will grow, I hear you laugh now? ''CORRECT''. Also I have only 5 X 3Tb hard drives going to use Raid 5 so that is about 8.1Tb of real estate space, for me I will add movies as and when I can and this system will grow with me as this media server will just sit in the cinema room doing nothing else but serving as an alternative way of showing blu ray films. So it is work in progress my friend I didn't want to be capped by the restraints of building small but a system that will allow me to grown my library as and when needed and is handy to have that amount of space eventually. 40Tb equates to roughly 900 full quality blu ray broadcast blu ray films. I really don't reckon much on 3D @ the minute so it will be straight 2D material I was using the Sony VPLW 400QM projector with about 400 Ansi Lumens of Brightness and now the new Pioneer has 2000 Ansi Lumens of Brightness and it is High Def as well as being able to project 3D blu rays it is the best projector money can buy don't belive the sales assistant I have spent considerable time investigating this projector and it is crystal as good as your LCD flat plasma HD TV. Only my viewing pleasure is 8 feet diagonal. You won't buy a Lcd tv in Currys that size any time soon.. And the cost would be prohibitive..

Your HDMI cable must be be version 1.4a I assumed you already knew that as the 1.3 HDMI cable is not 3D compliant.

I am just building my server now and once it is built that is it all I have to do is add those hard drives to make more room as and when my library grows. DVD-FAB is the only program you need for ripping it is trusted and has never not ripped a blu ray period. It just works.

I have deliberated for years to do this or not but my m8 has a setup like this and it is bloody fantastic once you go media server you won't wnat to go back to anything else nothing like having windows on an 8 foot 16:9 (widescreen) format. Now where is that pesky bluetooth mousey thing.


Scythe Kama Rack 5.25 will be a handy front breakout allowing the transferring via 2.5 HDD storage from main computer to media server. Here is the link http://www.systo.co.uk/uncategorised/kama-rack-5-25-sckmrk-5.html

Then IcyBox IB-555SSK 5-Bay SATA/SAS Hard Drive Backplane [IB-555SSK] for installing and removing hard drives saves opening the case side panel also has hard drive failure leds to signal a failed drive very handiferous or handy to you, lol.. Here is the link http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-036-BT&campaign=pcm/googleshopping.
 
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Nice. I wish I had seen that IcyBox before. I would have gotten one of those ages ago. And the Scythe Kama Rack is another handy looking piece of kit. I think I may just have to invest in both of those now giving me the potential for 9 x 3.5" + 2 x 2.5" drives with my HP Microserver set-up. How does the Icybox connect up to the rest of a system though?

NOTE: Just seen how you would fit it, and it looks like it will be no use for the Microserver. Might have to leave the IcyBox then :(

So are you using this just to stream then? To the MRX? I have an Onkyo 609 AV Amp but cannot stream video to it, only music. However, my Onkyo BR Player will stream my Video, as will my Panasonic GT30. I am currently using PS3 Media Server to stream to my TV, as it allows trancoding on the fly, and allows you to select which audio you wish to receive. The audio is sent via the ARC using a HDMI 1.4 cable to the Onkyo, then out to the B&W 600 series surround.

I also have another 609 set up in the cinema room, however, I only have a Optoma HD65 PJ in there, and an xbox 360. So the media is streamed to the xbox, then run through the 609 to the PJ / another B&W 600 series set-up. So no 3D in there yet. Although I will soon be looking to upgrade to a proper 3D PJ soon, but was thinking of going down the Panasonic route for that, for glasses compatibility with my current TV.

Do you have any other suggestions for software to use for streaming? I must admit I lke PS3MS, but am open to alternatives.
 
xs2man said:
Nice. I wish I had seen that IcyBox before. I would have gotten one of those ages ago. And the Scythe Kama Rack is another handy looking piece of kit. I think I may just have to invest in both of those now giving me the potential for 9 x 3.5" + 2 x 2.5" drives with my HP Microserver set-up. How does the Icybox connect up to the rest of a system though?

NOTE: Just seen how you would fit it, and it looks like it will be no use for the Microserver. Might have to leave the IcyBox then :(

So are you using this just to stream then? To the MRX? I have an Onkyo 609 AV Amp but cannot stream video to it, only music. However, my Onkyo BR Player will stream my Video, as will my Panasonic GT30. I am currently using PS3 Media Server to stream to my TV, as it allows trancoding on the fly, and allows you to select which audio you wish to receive. The audio is sent via the ARC using a HDMI 1.4 cable to the Onkyo, then out to the B&W 600 series surround.

I also have another 609 set up in the cinema room, however, I only have a Optoma HD65 PJ in there, and an xbox 360. So the media is streamed to the xbox, then run through the 609 to the PJ / another B&W 600 series set-up. So no 3D in there yet. Although I will soon be looking to upgrade to a proper 3D PJ soon, but was thinking of going down the Panasonic route for that, for glasses compatibility with my current TV.

Do you have any other suggestions for software to use for streaming? I must admit I lke PS3MS, but am open to alternatives.
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Hi! Yes the Anthem MRX you can through put the video straight through the anthem straight to the projector so the Anthem lets the video slip straight though so yes thats what i'm using it for and the sound is processed by the Anthem, well I assume that is how it will be as I havn't built this server yet but I had a TVIX media player and that worked so no reason why this wouldn't work either assuming everything is correct of course well here's hoping at any rate, it better work lol... Yadis or Zappitti are good media players for your comp they show artwork by scraping film info from IMDB so it's just like having the blu ray case in your hands but you are looking at your whole video blu ray library on the screen with playing times, info, screen ratio, sound, etc etc, look at my other thread for info on that or try vlc for video playback but you won't get artwork with that

I'm using the B & W 683 fronts.

Snell SR 30THX surrounds rear sound fill here is a link so you can have a looky http://www.snellacoustics.com/ProductDetails/3440.asp

Center channel is the B & W HTM61

Three subwoofers two B & W 600 ASW SUBS ON THE FRONT AND A paradigm SUB 15 @ the side offset the room rumbles I tell ya. Here is the link to have a wee nosey http://www.paradigm.com/products/pr...oofer/paradigm-reference/studio-series/sub-15

Projector is the Panasonic 7000u £1750 not a bad price EH! here is a link to the review http://www.projectorcentral.com/panasonic_PT-AE7000U_home_theater_projector_review.htm

I had the Lexicon MC8 but needed the HDMI for the hi def audio and picture so sold that MC8 for a loss & kept my Lexicon RX7 200 watt x 7 channels it weighs a ton @ 7.5 stone or 42.7 Klg and is a fantastic amplifier so not selling that as the Anthem has preouts for all 7 channels so can use my lexicon.. I nearly purchased their flagship D2v 3D but that costs like £8000 so made do with their MRX 300 which has the same components as their top of the range D2V 3D but without the THX certification and a host of other processing prowess but when you listen to it you would not be able to tell the difference between MRX 300 & the D2V seriously so why spend money on stuff you simply wont need or care about or notice at the end of the day it's the quality of the sound that matters and this anthem mrx 300 is fantastic as it comes with their ARC sound room correction mic package and that is thrown in for free and costs like £500 on it's own which is a fantastic new addition to their lesser selling entry models of processing sound amplifiers so saved loads on that. The guys @ thehomecinemacentre will keep you right for all your hi-fi stuff absolutely fantastic place to shop I will shop no place else for all my hi fi gear.

Well my friend better hit the sac work starts @ 6.30am and finishes when the job is done.
 
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