HDD for mass media storage?

ednory

ednory

ednory

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I am in the process of converting my bloated DVD collection onto HDD with the intention of creating a home server for streaming. I currently have a 2TB Samsung which is almost full so I will be buying the next drive on payday (I think its going to take a while to convert all the DVDs so I'm buying 1 HDD at a time and filling it up).
With some quick napkin maths I estimate I will need about 25TB in all (not including backup) so I don't want to make a mistake at this early stage.

So my questions are;

1. I don't know much about RAID setups but I'm thinking of ultimately going for a RAID 1 setup for backing up, so does the make of the HDD matter? For the purpose of RAID should I stick to the same make?

2. If the answer to 1. is that the make matters not and that my priorities are price first and performance/reliability a close second, what is the best 3TB (or even larger) HDD to get?

Edit: Budget approximately £150.00, preferably less.
 
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Hi and welcome to the forum.

RAID 1 isn't a backup solution it's for redundancy.

RAID 1 isn't a substitute for backup because there are a lot of risks that it can't protect against.

  • If you accidentally delete a file, it will be removed from both mirrored copies.
  • If your disk is corrupted by a software bug or virus, the corruption will be done to both mirrored copies simultaneously.
  • If someone breaks into your house they'll steal the box that holds both disks.
  • If your house gets flooded or burned both disks will be ruined.
Considering a 3TB drive is ~£130, and you'd need 18 with backups, are you really going to spend £2,340 plus the cost of the necessary hardware to run them?

25TB would be ~6,000 single layer DVDs. Do you actually have that many?

Have you thought of converting the DVDs to another file format, such as XviD or MP4 so that they take up less space?
 
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Whether you use the same make and model I feel is entirely up to you.

I prefer the same drives but the arguement against the same drives and of course for different drives is that if there was a manufacturing defect in a batch of drives, or indeed if there is simply a weakness in a particular part of a given model of drive, then when RAIDing, the error will crop up, and if you are using RAID 1 then the error will be in the same place on both drives thus ruining the whole reason for going RAID 1 in the first place!

My setups however have always used the same drive and only once have I bothered with RAID 1 - I feel that drives these days are very robust and I replace them regularly anyway, plus the old drives I still use for regular backups anyway.

As for good 3TB drives, this again is quite often down to personal choice.

Up to a couple of years ago, I was swearing by Seagate, however the number of failures that I have had from their drives in the last couple of years is too much to bear ( Even though I have a few that are seemingly rock solid too ). I used to dislike Western Digital but I have grown to like them now, and Samsung are my most current weapon of mass storage.

I must however confess that in my NAS box I have a pair of Seagate 1TB drives, ( ext2fs - stripped ) and my Server is housing 4x2TB Seagate drives ( JBOD )

WD however still offer 5 yr warranties on some of their drives.

Under £150 - What each you mean? - I dont think that you will get 3GB in 2 Drives for that, but each then my opinion would be WD Caviar Green SATA 6Gb/s 64MB. Its a nice drive... I think only Seagate is comparable at the price... £130 or a smidge under.
 
Do you really have that many DVDs? You should be getting at least 1200 DVD rips (This number assumes half of them are dual layered) per 2TB drive assuming you encode them properly.
 
I haven't counted for a while but I have around 1500+ DVD films and TV shows and around 100 bluray (mostly films). I'm converting them to MKV format as this is the format that was suggested to me as I want to maintain the quality, subtitles and audio tracks.
I have only done 1 bluray so far (Avatar) which took up 38GB and DVD films take up between 4GB and 7GB so I just did a quick approximation of 100 BD x 30GB = 3000GB and (bearing in mind I have counted a single TV series as 1) 3000 DVDs x 6GB = 18000GB. So in total 22000GB and adding about 3000GB for expansion makes 25TB (I think).

At the moment the task is to convert everything so the plan is just to buy a HDD, fill it, then buy another and craft the server once everything is on HDD. It has taken me about a month to fill 2TB.

I'm not too hot on file formats and encoding, so I am jus going by what a friend suggests as he is doing something similar. Is there a better format than MKV that offers the same or similar quality of audio and video and allows subtitles if required?
Or is there a better/cheaper/more efficient storage method than just stacking HDDs?
 
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MKV is just a container, what your doing is sticking the original video file, audio and subtitles into that container hence its huge size.

Most people recommend compressing the video file (using handbrake or such) then remuxing the audio back in. That way yuou save on space and can barely notice the image difference with the video file whilst maintaining decent audio.
 
ednory said:
I haven't counted for a while but I have around 1500+ DVD films and TV shows and around 100 bluray (mostly films). I'm converting them to MKV format as this is the format that was suggested to me as I want to maintain the quality, subtitles and audio tracks.
I have only done 1 bluray so far (Avatar) which took up 38GB and DVD films take up between 4GB and 7GB so I just did a quick approximation of 100 BD x 30GB = 3000GB and (bearing in mind I have counted a single TV series as 1) 3000 DVDs x 6GB = 18000GB. So in total 22000GB and adding about 3000GB for expansion makes 25TB (I think).

At the moment the task is to convert everything so the plan is just to buy a HDD, fill it, then buy another and craft the server once everything is on HDD. It has taken me about a month to fill 2TB.

I'm not too hot on file formats and encoding, so I am jus going by what a friend suggests as he is doing something similar. Is there a better format than MKV that offers the same or similar quality of audio and video and allows subtitles if required?
Or is there a better/cheaper/more efficient storage method than just stacking HDDs?
Click to expand...

For the sake of a few hours learning about encoding you could save yourself a good £2000 and fit all your movies onto a single 3tb (maybe 4tb including your bluerays) hard drive and another one for backup, but..... is there any reason you want a backup system if you have the physical DVDs though?), just put them somewhere safe (in a different building to your server).

Have a look at x264 encoding, I think (don't quote me) it is open source, and it has fantastic compression and image quality.
 
KelDG said:
For the sake of a few hours learning about encoding you could save yourself a good £2000 and fit all your movies onto a single 3tb (maybe 4tb including your bluerays) hard drive and another one for backup, but..... is there any reason you want a backup system if you have the physical DVDs though?), just put them somewhere safe (in a different building to your server).

Have a look at x264 encoding, I think (don't quote me) it is open source, and it has fantastic compression and image quality.
Click to expand...

Yep, you pretty much can't go wrong, just bang in CRF20 and encode in x264 and you've got good file size to quality ratios. Of course theres a lot more to it and you could spent weeks developing and putting together scripts and filters to get a desired output but in a nutshell if you do that you'll save yourself a lot of money. I personally use MeGUI but that or HandBrake will get the results you need.
 
I'm using MakeMKV at the moment which I think is not equipped with a codec selector. I have used HandBrake in the past but found that MakeMKV has the greatest success rate.

I will have a play about and use a film to make comparisons, i can't say no to saving £2000.
 
Just an update after playing about with Handbrake for a bit. Using the "Normal" settings the MKV it created using the MKV created by MakeMKV as the source was 1.3GB, down from 6.2GB. I think this might be the way to go as the picture and audio quality were very similar. However I need to figure out how to get it to also carry across the subtitle track as it seems to have left that behind.
Doubled the work required but saves a lot of dosh.
 
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