How are you storing your ripped movies??

[Ericft]

Just wanted to get some feedback from forum members about ways in which you are all storing and playing back your ripped movies. Specifically for those folks who are not using a WHS as their sagetv server. also what made you decide to do it that way.

1. on Sagetv server machine with lots of HDD storage
2. attached to sagetv server with external enclosure HDD USB vs esata
3. attached to sagetv server via external RAID enclosure USB vs Esata
4. On WHS server streamed to sagetv server machine
5. other (please elaborate)

and also what you back up solution is for those ripped movies...coz noone wants to do it all over again!
thanks for the feedback.

[reggie14]

I used to just keep them on my Sage server, but a few months ago I set up an unRAID server. I've been reasonably happy with it, although I find it a very unpolished product. Sometimes I wonder if WHS would have been a better option. But I have more storage space with unRAID, since rather than than doing folder duplication like WHS, it has a parity drive (sort of like RAID4). I have four 2TB hard drives in there, giving me 6TB of usable space. I'll probably buy one or two more 2TB hard drives somewhat soon, mainly to make more space for desktop and laptop backups, which are also stored on the unRAID server.

As for a backup plan, well, the DVDs are the backups. Sure it would suck to have to re-rip discs, but I can deal with one drive failure before that's a problem. And I wouldn't necessarily have to deal with re-ripping everything- just the DVDs on the two failed drives.

I'm more concerned about losing TV shows, which I've ripped and then encoded. Ripping DVDs isn't so bad, but encoding them in Handbrake takes time. I think I'll use the extra storage space on my SageTV server (that used to hold the ripped DVDs) to backup the TV shows on my unRAID server. At some point I'll run out of space, but I'm not going to go to great trouble to backup that stuff.

[razrsharpe]

this screams for a poll

on my sage server machine in a hardware raid 5 setup... 3 different raid 5 disks.

I don't backup all my dvds/bds... i dont have or want to have several terrabyted dedicated to backup movies.

[paulbeers]

I currently use the Norco 4020 case for my Sage server. This has room for 22 hard drives (2 for OS and 20 hot swappable bays). I use 8 of them housing 1.5TB drives hooked to a Dell Perc 5i drive giving me 9TB of storage (7 for the RAID and 1 as a Hot Spare). This gives me 2 drives of redundancy before I lose data (unless one were to die before the RAID rebuilds itself using the hot spare). I also have a second Perc 5i currently supporting 3 - 500GB drives for file storage (eventually will be converted to 8 - 2TB drives for further DVD/Blu-Ray storage).

This was the cheapest way I could do hardware RAID. I know, RAID isn't a replacement for a good backup, but frankly it is good enough for my needs.

I used FlexRAID for about a year and felt like I babysat it too much. It was a pain to setup and a pain to update/upgrade. I'm much happier with my current setup. I also looked into unRAID, but it was more expensive than my Perc 5i card, and required me to run a second box (I suppose I could have set it up as a VM, but at the time I was less experienced with VM's).

[lobosrul]

5x1.5 TB SATA drives in raid-5 using a Highpoint 2320 PCI-E RAID card. Its sort of halfway between a true hardware controller and software raid (which I don't trust). It works great. I've had 4 HD streams being written to it with comksip running on each, 4 clients viewing and 1 DVD being ripped to it all simultaneously with no problems.

Also have a Thecus N5200 NAS in raid-5 with 5x750GB drives.

In case anyone wondering, yes I do know that raid-5 works with more than 5 drives.

[RocKKer]

Raid 5 using Linux software raid on 4 1TB WD Greenies using SATA 3 on my Sage server.

Very resilient, mature, easy to grow/reshape, fast and FREE. Self monitors and will email me when it discovers a problem. It will automatically utilize a spare drive, (assuming one is installed) when it notices a problem.

Couple that with the XFS file system (with proper mount options) and little to no file fragmentation. I am experimenting with a nightly defrag but I know there is not much for it to do.

I have one logical volume, with a subdirectory for movies, pics, music, TV (respectively).

I also use SMB to share this space out to other windows PC's in my house.

[pjpjpjpj]

As probably the only person using Sage who doesn't have enough ripped DVDs to care about having RAID, backups, high-speed SATA connections, and whatnot, I simply have all of "mom and dad's" DVDs ripped in full DVD format on a 500 GB USB drive, and all of the kid's DVDs (Disney and whatnot) on another 500 GB USB drive. They pretty much remain "resting" in power-save mode 99% of the time, and I don't mind the 2 seconds of spin-up when I actually need to access a movie.

About the only thing I can say that's "fancy" about them is that they're on a UPS.

But I know I'm in the large minority.

[davephan]

It's not just DVD rips, it's also many TB of recordings. I'm migrating my video library from five RAID 1 drive pairs to a separate unRAID server. I'll increase my storage to about 20 TB with one RAID 1 drive pair in the SageTV computer, and the rest of my drives in the unRAID server. The unRAID server can be configured with up to 20 data drives, plus one parity drive, plus one cache drive. It's far more space efficient than running RAID 1 drive pairs.

Dave

[Bizarroterl]

Unraid. Inexpensive, runs on almost any hardware, plenty fast for multiple HD streams, easily expanded, and reliable.

[bits]

I have two PCs on my network that I stuffed drives into for a total of about 8TB. One PC which is on 24/7 is where STV records to and where the most viewed video is stored. The other PC is powered down each night and powered on when there is a need. I have been using this setup for years. IMHO the only video worth backing up is non-replaceable home videos and digital pics. The rest is boob tube stuff and DVD/BD of which I have the bought and paid for disks. With Hulu, Netflix and so on one can easily find just about anything that played on TV. It would be somewhat of a chore to put a bunch of DVD/BDs back onto a drive but it is a chore that can be done at one's own pace.

[Menehune]

I have a 1TB drive without any raid or backup that I store my ripped DVDs on. I have <20 ripped DVDs on the drive, but about 40 compressed DVD movies (handbrake encoded mp4 files). Probably 300GB of DVDs.
I've got all the originals so I'm not too worried about drive failure.

[Ericft]

for those of you using unraid, have you been able to use it as a back up solution for other computers on your network, be it mac or PC? and do you find any lag in bluray data transmission to the sagetv server and also extenders on the network even with gigabit NIC, cat 6 cables and gigabit switches?

[davephan]

Originally Posted by Ericft

for those of you using unraid, have you been able to use it as a back up solution for other computers on your network, be it mac or PC? and do you find any lag in bluray data transmission to the sagetv server and also extenders on the network even with gigabit NIC, cat 6 cables and gigabit switches?

It depends on the backup. I make periodic disk images of the boot/programs drive, and save it to a secondary local drive. The image files are then replicated to the unRAID server. Files can also be backed up to the unRAID server.

The unRAID server is hardware independent. The hardware only needs to be able to boot to a flash drive.

I don't have any ripped bluerays. I would need to purchase a blueray drive for a computer to rip a blueray.

Dave

[PiX64]

I use a seperate server to store all of my digital media which includes:
- DVD
- Blu-Ray
- Music
- Photos
---------
I also use this same setup to store my personal files

Previously for about a year i used
ubuntu server 9.10 on a dual core athlon x2 64 bit with 2GB of ram
Dell Perc 5/i
4 x 1TB at RAID 5
4 x 1.5TB at Raid 5

Currently I am using unRAID server PRO on the above hardware
This is running off of a thumbdrive , and has the following devices

Parity - 1.5 TB
drives 1-3 : 1.5 TB
drives 4-8 : 1TB

I went with this solution because i wanted to have it seperate from my sage server. (the whole don't keep all your eggs in one basket motive)
I switched to unraid for the following reaons:
- Disk Spin down/power save
- Only the disk being accessed needs to be spinning (for movies this is genious. why should i have 9 disk spinning if i only need the files off of one?)
- very easily expandable
- Grows as my media library grows
- allows for mutliple disk failure. depending on the combination of failed disks, the data loss will be isolated to the disks that fail. IMO much better than a Raid 5 solution. if you have 10 drives connected all to raid 5 and you lose 2 disks...your SOL!! i used raid 5 for a little over a year, and was happy with it, but in my opinion it just didnt' make sense for a home setup.
- Easily uprage/add componnent, or even move entire server to a new case with new hardware, and not have to shuffle data around, etc.

If i had to recommend a solution to someone, and if i had to do it again i would have started with an unRAID solution from the beginning

* I use anyDVDHD to backup my DVD's and blu-rays. hands down the easiest program i have ever used!

~Pix64

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by Ericft

for those of you using unraid, have you been able to use it as a back up solution for other computers on your network, be it mac or PC?

unRAID exposes SMB shares, just like Windows does when you share a folder. So anything that can read and write to SMB shares will work, which is pretty much everything. There was a bug in the last version of Acronis Backup and Recovery that prevented me from backing up directly to an SMB share, but that bug was resolved in the update they put out a few weeks ago.

The only potential issue is speed. Besides usability, one of unRAID's greatest disadvantages is write speeds. Write speeds to unRAID shares used to be around 10-20MB/sec. However, they're much faster now. I can usually get around 40MB/sec write speeds on my unRAID server, which uses modern hardware. That's probably about as fast as it will go. If you really think you need faster write speeds you could use a cache drive, where writes first go to an unprotected drive, and then are copied over to the protected array during off hours. But, I don't think that's necessary. You probably wouldn't be able to run backups much faster than 40MB/sec anyway

Originally Posted by Ericft

and do you find any lag in bluray data transmission to the sagetv server and also extenders on the network even with gigabit NIC, cat 6 cables and gigabit switches?

It depends on what you mean by lag. If you mean can you read from the unRAID server fast enough for blu-rays, the answers is definitely yes. Unraid read speeds are the same speeds as reading off a single hard drive, since there's no striping like a RAID setup. You shouldn't have any problems, with one possible exception. Writes are a pretty I/O intensive operation in unRAID. If you have a high-speed write operation, you might have a problem if you're unlucky enough to be reading and writing from the same drive. You'd probably be OK, but it wouldn't surprise me if you saw a hiccup here or there. unRAID is probably a bit worse than WHS when it comes to that, since unRAID writes are more I/O intensive than WHS writes.

But, there is a potential lag issue. As PiX64 pointed out, an advantage of unRAID is that it will spin down unused drives in the array. This is good from a power saving perspective, and probably from a drive reliability perspective, but it creates a problem. Lets say you put your DVD on the unRAID server. When you start a DVD in Sage, unRAID will have to spin-up the drive that DVD is on before it will start playing. This does create a delay of a couple seconds. And it seems like 1 out of 10 times Sage gets confused and I have to stop playback and restart it again to get it to play (or maybe that's just me being impatient).

SageDonkey created a utility for SageMC to automatically spin up all drives when you access the video library. I've been too lazy to install it, because the installation process is a little involved, but you might want to look into it you use SageMC. SageDonkey has been quiet lately, but maybe someone will port it to Sage v7.

I see from your signature that you already have a pretty big WHS server. Out of curiosity, why are you thinking about making a change?

[PiX64]

don't forget in the PRO version you can use a cache drive which GREATLY speeds up system access... i dont' use it but have read if you need to do things like recording to the drives and so forth it is very solid!

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by PiX64

don't forget in the PRO version you can use a cache drive which GREATLY speeds up system access... i dont' use it but have read if you need to do things like recording to the drives and so forth it is very solid!

Right, I mentioned the cache drive, and said it probably isn't necessary. I haven't tried it, but people over on the unRAID forums seem to report write speeds around 60MB/sec. That's better, but in my opinion not enough of an improvement to warrant using a cache drive. From what I understand, cache drives were put into unRAID mainly because previous versions of unRAID were quite a bit slower with writes, so there really was a huge performance improvement.

That being said, a cache drive would fix the hypothetical problematic situation I mentioned in my previous post, where you have a high-speed write operation going on at the same time as blu-ray playback.

[JetreL]

Well I am a WHS guy (I went with it because ease of use.) and I do store mine on a software raided drive backed up mostly because I don't want to re-rip 400+ DVDs. The software I use to rip is DVD-Fab, it has a nice interface, is supported very well (any problems I have ever had are almost always resolved in the beta version available), and while it is a bit of a steep purchase if you plan on backing up alot of disks it's a small price to pay!

[Biggen]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

I currently use the Norco 4020 case for my Sage server. This has room for 22 hard drives (2 for OS and 20 hot swappable bays). I use 8 of them housing 1.5TB drives hooked to a Dell Perc 5i drive giving me 9TB of storage (7 for the RAID and 1 as a Hot Spare). This gives me 2 drives of redundancy before I lose data (unless one were to die before the RAID rebuilds itself using the hot spare). I also have a second Perc 5i currently supporting 3 - 500GB drives for file storage (eventually will be converted to 8 - 2TB drives for further DVD/Blu-Ray storage).

This was the cheapest way I could do hardware RAID. I know, RAID isn't a replacement for a good backup, but frankly it is good enough for my needs.

I used FlexRAID for about a year and felt like I babysat it too much. It was a pain to setup and a pain to update/upgrade. I'm much happier with my current setup. I also looked into unRAID, but it was more expensive than my Perc 5i card, and required me to run a second box (I suppose I could have set it up as a VM, but at the time I was less experienced with VM's).

How are you monitoring those Perc drives? Is there a utility to can "login" with that allows you to monitor the array?

I am considering purchasing a Perc but want to make sure I can monitor the health of the array from another machine on the network.

[SWKerr]

I dropped my WHS in favor a of Win7-64 setup. I did this mainly for RAID. I liked the WHS setup ok but found the duplication to be a big waste of space. I also did not like the fact that there was no redundancy option for the boot disk. After discovering the plans for the next WHS (Vail) I decided to abandon it a I could not find any compelling reason to keep it.

Setup:
AMD Phenom II X4 with a Gigabyte AMD-890G motherboard with 4GB of RAM.
My boot disk is a RAID Mirror of 2x1TB drives with another array of 4x1.5 TB in a RAID5 setup.
I have one 1.5 TB outside of the RAID for offline backups. (occasional backups to an external 1.5 TB)
Tuners: 1x HDPR (Antenna) and 2xHD-PVRs hooked to DirecTV
Server also hosts MCE setup with one Aver PCIe tuner (Antenna) attached to Xbox360
Playon is also hosted on the server

I use Microsoft's SyncToy (Free) to do incremental backups of the Sage configs, Music, Pictures and Movies. I do the Sage backup nightly with a therapeutic reboot and once a week it will do a backup of the movies etc. I do not try to backup up the TV recoding folders and just live with the risk that the RAIDs might fail.

I will rip all moves to m2st files and use SageTV Clients for all playback. I occasionally play with XBMC, Boxee and the Xbox360 thru MCE. Really Sage does it all at this point from one interface so I have no real reason to use anything else.