Hard Drive Mapping Question

[Greg]

If I decided not to use RAID how would I employ multiple hard drives? For example, could I tell SageTV to send my TV recordings to drive A. I would then place my music on drive B and my DVD/Blue Ray rips on drive C, etc.? Note: this is for a non WHS set-up. Not sure, but this may be a Windows 7 set-up with HD-200 extenders.

What if, for instance, due to capacity limitations of the drives, I needed to have my DVD/Blue Ray rips on two or more drives. How would SageTV basically, treat those two or more drives as one or does it have too.
Would the same solution work for Sage TV recordings?

I would also have the OS and other key progarms on a separate drive.

Is it better to have more smaller, say 500 GB drives vs fewer 1 TB drives?

Thanks,
Greg

[CollinR]

I have 4 video drives and a multimedia drive with everything else. You can map the root of multiple hard drives, so e:, f:, g: and so on. Also you want to level the recording drives so they all get used equally.

[Menehune]

When you run the setup wizard, you can specify which drives and folders contain which content. Sage will then look in those folders for your pictures, mp3s, dvds, etc. During configuration you can also tell sage which folders/drives to record to.

I have an E drive for recordings and an F drive for my archived shows, imported videos and DVD rips.

See page 144 in the sage TV manual: "Media Center Import Directories" for details on how to configure which folders sage will look into for your existing media files.

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by Greg

Is it better to have more smaller, say 500 GB drives vs fewer 1 TB drives?

More drives means more load on your power supply (especially during bootup), more heat generated inside your case, more fan noise to get rid of it. Assuming price per GB is about the same, I'd go with fewer large drives.

[Greg]

Excellent...........thanks for the responses.

Greg

[davephan]

You could use the free Microsoft SyncToy to copy the files between the directories. DirMon2 could be used to detect when new files need to be copied.

Dave

[stevech]

I use SecondCopy, for non-video smaller files. Set and Forget.

[davephan]

Originally Posted by stevech

I use SecondCopy, for non-video smaller files. Set and Forget.

I checked the SecondCopy web site. How well does it work to backup the large video files to another drive?

If second copy worked with wildcards, then you could use it to move only certain files to a directory where the files would be processed by ShowAnalyzer or Comskip. This would help limit the ShowAnalyzer or Comskip processing only the files you want processed, and not the commercial free movies.

According to the web site, SecondCopy can't be used with wildcards.

Can you setup multiple copy jobs, such as copying d:\video to e:\video and another job to copy f:\video to g:\video, etc? If the program would work well enough for copying all the video files, then you would have the protection equivalent to RAID 1 without the downside of possibly loosing the RAID, and you wouldn't need another computer running WHS or Unraid to protect the video files.

I do like the ability to lower the priority that is built into the program. Although without the ability to limit the copying to certain wildcards limits the benefits of SecondCopy.

Dave

[stevech]

Originally Posted by davephan

I checked the SecondCopy web site. How well does it work to backup the large video files to another drive?
Dave

It's just an NTFS file copy throughput issue. I use SecondCopy to automatically watch and keep current my backups on a grab-and-go external USB 1TB drive. I like that the $30 SecondCopy just runs in the background and backs up what folders on what PCs I told it to by what criteria I called out, e.g., check once a day, copy when folder contents change, etc. I have about 10 profiles setup, for the always-on PC to backup 3 PCs on the LAN. It copes with those PC's that are turned off for the moment.

For videos, I use a pair of 500GB drives in RAID 1 with two partitions: 30GB for a bootable windows partion and the other big partition as 64KB block size for Sage's videos. Planning to go to 2TB drives when they get cheap enough. Instead of doing file copies as would WHS or other file dupe scheme. I decided to do RAID for videos since they are not as important as family photos, of which I have about 2GB, and mostly likely is a drive failure which, I presume, RAID1 will save me on. RAID is vulnerable to a file system corruption, but NTFS has become very robust in this regard.

[Tikker]

syncback is awesome too

[Fuzzy]

Sage is quite flexible in it's mapping capabilities. Personally, i have 4 750GB's and a dingle 1TB. All have a 'Recordings' folder and a 'DVDs' folder. I usually spread my DVD/BD collection among the drives, and sage will automatically spread the recordings among them (It will always record to the drive with the most free space). There are problems with sage's mechanism for determining waht drive to use, so that if you, for some reason, have a lot more free space on one drive than the others, and try to do many HD recordings, it will try to put them all on that single drive, raising performance concerns. The only way to prevent this is to try to 'level' your drive space usage on your own. You could also lock encoders to specific drives, but this could lead to the drive attached to the highest merit tuner getting full before the others, and prematurely deleting recordings.

[stevech]

For all those drives... how do you protect from drive failure, data loss?

[MattHelm]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

...All have a 'Recordings' folder and a 'DVDs' folder. ...

This is what I do too. Only with 2 (changing to 3 soon) 1TB drives)

[MattHelm]

Originally Posted by stevech

For all those drives... how do you protect from drive failure, data loss?

For TV shows??? They're just TV shows! Plus they have this new fangled thing called a re-run!

For the DVDs? Master copy on "MY" machine, copy's on the servers. 3 copies at 2 different locations, and I can always re-rip.

[davephan]

Originally Posted by Tikker

syncback is awesome too

Can you copy or move only files matching certain wildcards with Syncback, such as *nbcnightlynews*.mpeg. If sync back could move only selected shows, then it would be easier to selectively process shows with ShowAnalyzer or Comskip.

How well does Syncback work to replicate large video files onto another drive? Can the copying be set to 'low' priority?

Dave

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by stevech

For all those drives... how do you protect from drive failure, data loss?

There is nothing on there I can't lose. I mean, it's TV shows, and DVD/BD rips of discs that are in the closet not far out of reach. One of my 750's actually DOES have some sort of failure going on. I unplugged it, because it was making the system unstable. I plan on getting a replacement drive, recovering what I can from the disc onto the new one, plugging the new one back in in it's place, assigning it the same drive letter as the old drive, and I'm back with nearly everything that was there.. worst case I lose less than a fifth of my recordings that are mostly multitudes of kids shows and silly adult cartoons. the few first runs I have recorded that I miss can be watched on Hulu Desktop (integrated nicely with sage) or 'other' sources.

[stevech]

We have a few dozen keepers - like Christmas shows and certain movies.

But someday, when a drive fails, I hope my RAID1 will let me avoid a WAF-plummet. That's the issue.

[Tikker]

Originally Posted by davephan

Can you copy or move only files matching certain wildcards with Syncback, such as *nbcnightlynews*.mpeg. If sync back could move only selected shows, then it would be easier to selectively process shows with ShowAnalyzer or Comskip.

How well does Syncback work to replicate large video files onto another drive? Can the copying be set to 'low' priority?

Dave

you can literally do anything with syncback

you can set up any kind of filter you like, you can set it to grab just stuff from that day, stuff with specific text matches, etc etc