Mo' Drives

[Haywood]

When I bought my NAS last year, I only put four drives in it, leaving four empty bays. I was planning on building a second RAID 5 array with 6TB drives, but NewEgg had a Cyber Monday sale on 4TB HGST NAS drives that I just couldn't say no to. I guess I will just have to make do with 21TB of usable NAS space. I'm sure I will manage, somehow.

 

[heeman]

With all those drives and all that Scotch.............I think you are good for a least a couple of months!

bscene-drinkingcheers: bscene-drinkingcheers:

 

[Haywood]

I am in the middle of converting most of my music library to FLAC and completely re-tagging and reorganizing it. Then I plan to rip all of the remaining DVDs that I don't have UV or DMA copies of. Between movies and TV shows, it is at least 600 discs. I have some Blu-Rays to rip as well. I'm guessing it will work out to 4-5TB. I figure I'll have somewhere around 8-9TB of free space left when I'm all done, which should absorb several more years of television content without having to archive anything.

 

[Deleted member 133]

With all those drives and all that Scotch.............I think you are good for a least a couple of months!

bscene-drinkingcheers: bscene-drinkingcheers:

But there are laws against drinking and "driving"!

 

[Haywood]

With all those drives and all that Scotch.............I think you are good for a least a couple of months!

bscene-drinkingcheers: bscene-drinkingcheers:

But there are laws against drinking and "driving"!

<rimshot>

 

[Botch]

With all those drives and all that Scotch.............I think you are good for a least a couple of months!

bscene-drinkingcheers: bscene-drinkingcheers:

But there are laws against drinking and "driving"!

<rimshot>

AA needs a "groan" button. :doh:

 

[Haywood]

My drives arrived today and my NAS is in the process of converting my four disc RAID 5 array into an 8 disc RAID 6 array. When it completes, I will have a single volume with a bit over 21.5TB of space. Muhuhahahahaha!

 

[yromj]

My drives arrived today and my NAS is in the process of converting my four disc RAID 5 array into an 8 disc RAID 6 array. When it completes, I will have a single volume with a bit over 21.5TB of space. Muhuhahahahaha!

Flash back to 1995 and tell me if that if someone told you that you would ever want, need, or have this much storage what would you have said? I would have said "How would anyone ever use that much storage?"

That's a lot of storage and I am very jealous. Being able to watch anything from my collection from any room w/o having to get up would be very cool.

John

 

[Flint]

I am with John, impressive.

Based on experience, I find it hilarious when people hear about some new technological capacity (i.e. Storage, Bandwidth, Screen Resolution, RAM Size, etc.) and insistently declare they would never, ever, ever, not in a million years, need that much xxxx. Then, just a few months later they are buying the very thing they mockingly and dismissively swore they'd never need. HA!

 

[Haywood]

The NAS is a QNAP TS-853 Pro with a 2.0Ghz quad-core Celeron, 8GB DDR3 memory, four gigabit Ethernet ports, a built-in Kodi client with HDMI output, robust VM support and a bunch of other features. I use HGST 7200 RPM NAS drives, because of their high reliability and solid performance. I run both Plex Media Server and Logitech Media Server (for the Squeezeboxes). Plex makes all of my media available on almost any device from anywhere with Internet access and has the ability to sync files to local storage for offline playback. Both run natively on the NAS. I also have a Windows Server 2012 R2 virtual machine for running things that do not run on the proprietary Linux operating system (three cheers for MSDN).

 

[Batman]

Two other friends (one being MJAldridge) and myself have been sharing a 6-bay server (4tb per bay) for a couple years, each server is mirrored redundantly at all three locations so we definitely maximize the available storage. We have access to our combined BD and TV libraries (somewhere in the range of ~2400 movies and shows. Don't ask me about the technical specifications or how they are partitioned (if at all) because I don't know and don't care to unless I really need to learn. But the drive serves AppleTvs throughout my home and then has an app called StreamToMe that serves all of our mobile devices on or off wifi. It really is very convenient to be able to access all your HD content from anywhere. I'm curious about Plex to an extent but haven't had a need to scratch that itch yet. If I weren't committed to putting in the BDs for best possible performance in the theater it may be something I'd be more willing to look into. The StreamToMe can be a little finicky at times because I'm terrible at maintenance/updates and the mobile clients access the server(s) via an assigned domain. But our setup has worked for us thus far.

 

[Haywood]

One drawback to Plex is that there are only two client options that I know of that can handle Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master. One is an actual PC and the other is the NVidia SHIELD. Most clients can only handle maybe 15Mbps for total bit-rate, so fully uncompressed Blu-Ray rips are a challenge. Plex can transcode on the fly, but my NAS is not up to that kind of load. I use KODI for the uncompressed stuff, of which I have very, very little. This is not an issue at all for DVD rips, recorded television or music. It is only a problem with Blu-Ray rips. You can rip a movie to BluRay and compress it to a level comparable to an iTunes HD or Vudu HDX movie and play it on pretty much any device with no transcoding though.

 

[Haywood]

My drives are installed and I successfully migrated from RAID 5 to RAID 6. I now have 21.45TB of usable space, a bit over 7TB of which is full. I am nearly done re-doing my music library in FLAC, complete with re-tagging and reorganization at the file level. Next comes ripping hundreds of DVDs. That is going to be the really laborious part.