Local Mass Storage...Best Option

apple_man77

apple_man77

apple_man77

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25 Aug 2010
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527
Hello,

I'm wanting to create a mass storage drive so I can store 40TB + of 4k films etc. It will be plugged directly in to a media player (Zappiti) and I don't need to access the films/data over my network like a NAS drive as its purely for storing films.

I've been looking at stuff like JBODS (Icy Box) etc. I don't want anything too technical just something that'll plug in USB C / 3.1 and allow me to slot a few 8tb hard drives in. Its in a separate room to my cinema room and so noise/heat isn't a primary concern however I'd like something that runs reasonably cool for the sake of the HD's and something thats reliable. I don't really want to spend silly money if possible - I've seen some for around £150 but then the reviews start putting me off and the ICY Box type ones seem at the higher end and a little more sophisticated...

Thanks for any help.
 
I've been looking those JBODS myself and not pulled the trigger, yet. Many seem very limited it terms of RAID, or even volume spanning.
 
Sorry for the slow reply - just seen this.

Still not got anything yet - I'm a bit of a nightmare researching and reading reviews - think I've found one and then start reading reviews and people moaning about heat build up / not going in to stand by etc etc.

I think ICY box seems the best option as a JBOD - QNAP/Synology seem good options if you need NAS/RAID but for a 4/5 bay drive a lot more money than a JBOD type device.
 
I just ran out of space.

I've abandoned expanding my media library. I'll just buy a 4k Blu-ray Player for the small amount of 4k I have and small collection of Bluray discs that are of hard to find favourites
Dumping all DVDs, only keeping a handful of very hard to find favourites. Likewise dumping my existing obsolete Blu-ray Player.
I've bought a 5TB portable to have a some free space to move stuff around. I had some dead space in Encrypted backup files etc., which I've been clearing out. But I needed space to do it.

I mainly use a gaming laptop. I'm still not sure if I'll keep it, or move back to a desktop. Space is an issue.
 
Most external JBOD's don't have any form of redundancy so you'd have no safety net if a drive was to fail... do you have a 'backup' set up? I'd be more concerned about losing data than picking your case.

Personally I'd either be building (I intend to do so soon in fact) a small server (do you have any old pc's laying around?) built around truenas, unraid (my planned direction) or even windows (storage spaces) and then set up some sort of redundant storage array but it seems that zappiti isn't supported by truenas/unraid (unraid seems to have a beta docker floating around)... So you could do a windows build with their server software

NAS is the 'easiest' option, it's basically just a case of plugging in the drives, setting it up as you want it, installing the above server software on some supported hardware and moving/linking the files etc... you are limited to certain brands (asustor or synology... I'd pick asustor) and there are likely some restrictions on which model are supported.

@apple_man77 Zappiti seem to do their own nas, incredibly overpriced though. Variants of the case, minus the optical drive and slightly different frontage, are readily available on [a chinese store] for around £75 if you want to gamble on delivery etc... Not sure what their server hardware or software is but the low wattage to me says atom/celeron (c5105 seems popular these days) and it's probably running a semi custom linux distro with their software etc

If you did want to just go usb based storage, qnap do some which might be worth a look
https://www.qnap.com/en-uk/product/series/expansion (scroll to the bottom)
 
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it all kind of depends on what you are saving on it - and surely there comes a time when (if your network is fast enough) that you just plump for a cloud server solution instead (like hetzner) - the hardware and redundancy is no longer your problem, so long as your upload is fast enough tomake it useful
 
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