Need some storage advice

EddScott · 26 Feb 2010 at 10:06

I'm considering have a media server at home and at the moment I've got 2 500GB HDs. One of the 500s is a back up in an external caddy, the other has some films and what not on.

I was thinking of buying a 1TB HD and putting that into the external caddy. Doing a full backup onto the 1TB and then using both the 500s in RAID 1.

Does that now mean that I've got 1TB to store media and 1TB in the external caddy as a back up drive?

Would 1TB be enough to put DVDs and Blurays on? We've got about 20 Blurays and 100+ DVDs. I will probably only buy Blurays from now on.

The PC in the living room will be for gaming and streaming to the TV. Will a single 30GB SSD be enough for Win7 OS and some games? I don't play games heavily.

rpstewart · 26 Feb 2010 at 10:31

RAID1 is mirroring so you'll only have 500Gb of available space on the array.

DVDs can be 6-8Gb each uncompressed, Blu Rays are in the 20Gb area so you're going to need a fair whack of space unless you're willing to spend the time compressing them.

bledd · 26 Feb 2010 at 10:35

30gb is cutting it tight for Vista/7, 40gb is the 'safe' zone imo, and that's with system restore disabled etc

EddScott · 26 Feb 2010 at 11:28

Doh, sorry I meant RAID 0

So I could be looking at needing several TB of storage space - plus the same again as a backup and a 60+ SSD if I want Win7 and some games on the living room PC?

Most of my budget will end up going on storage

rpstewart · 26 Feb 2010 at 11:30

If you're storing the movies uncompressed then the original disk is the backup.

EddScott · 26 Feb 2010 at 11:36

Thats true. I guess I wouldn't need exactly the same amount of space for backup just media that is only on the PC - pics and stuff.

Might give the SSD a miss. Not sure how much of a difference it would make to gaming compared to the cost.

bledd · 26 Feb 2010 at 13:45

Don't use raid 0 for storage

I'd just buy multiple 1tb drives and use robocopy or something like that to mirror the data on them daily