How are you storing your ripped movies??

[heffneil]

50Mb per stream per extender can add up plus I have two HD HomeRuns that stream over the same network. All in all I might as well use the secondary nic's on both machines. It can't hurt at this point. Plus I can get that unplugged icon off the systray!

I added up the machine cost on newegg and so far it is something like $8500. A lot of dough. The drives are the majority of the cost with 20 at something like $199 a piece.

I am thinking about looking at this now: http://www.supermicro.com/products/c...7A-R1400LP.cfm

This is a 32 bay chassis with 24 in the front and 12 in the back bottom. Pretty awesome! It is pricey but might be the best way to go!

Neil

[davephan]

The Supermicro chassis looks very expensive, what does it cost? The density looks pretty high too. One of the Norco 20 drive chassis reviews mentioned that you could not get a playing card between the drives. I wonder if the cooling would be enough on the Supermicro chassis, if the density is very high.

If you use unRAID, you can add drives over time, maybe when they are on sale, as you need more space.

I think I'll try using a crossover cable when I put the unRAID computer in the same room as the SageTV computer. Both computers already have dual nics, where the second nics are not used. I already have a 100 meg crossover cable. I could by a 1 gig crossover cable if it look like it might help.

Dave

[heffneil]

That chassis is like $1300. Not cheap but it isn't a hunk of junk like that Norco chassis. The Norco can't identify drives when they fail which could be absolutely disastrous! The cable shouldn't make a difference of the speed unless you are using less pairs but I thought that was 10Mbit vs 100/1000 Mbit.

Neil

[Fuzzy]

For starters, I would NOT by a $200 hard drive for this. Especially in that quantity. Newegg sells 20 pack's of drives specifically for people with obviously too much money to spend (or businesses). For instance, they've got a 20 Pack of 2TB AV-GP drives (which are actually geared specifically for media storage, targeted at the DVR market), for $2,799.99. That's only $140/unit. (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136667) A case, and simple motherboard and the controllers required would probably add up to an extra $500-600 if done right. No need for expensive drive controllers if you use something like UnRaid.

As for identifying the failed drive.. you could do that with a sharpie or even step up a notch into the P-Touch labelling... seriously, that isn't worth paying $1300 for a metal box to hold your drives. Redundant power supplies also aren't that important, unless you actually HAVE redundant power sources. They DO provide you with 24/7 uptime, but in the event of a power supply failure, do you really think the time it takes to replace it is going to be that catastrophic on your entertainment?

[heffneil]

I have two ups's in my rack so redundant power supplies are valuable. You also don't know if a drive gets kicked from the raid and is rebuilt then your new parity drive could be your first bad drive hence your ptouch / sharpie method is out the window. Edit: Um if my raid dies because of a power failure or a bad power supply then yes great that is wonderful. With 400 movies in my library how much is my time worth?!

Are those drives you listed 7200 RPM and good for raid? A lot of the 5900 "green" drives have HUGE problems with getting kicked out of the raid array because they appear dead at times.

I won't run unraid. You can't beat a real controller which is what I am looking at. Unraid is unsupported except from the developer. I am intrigued and would love to consider it and save the $1300 on the controller I am going to buy but I just don't see it happening.

I am down to 850 Gigs of my 5.4 TB array

[Fuzzy]

Well, guess if you've got the money to throw at it, why not? I just don't see it as anywhere near worth it for home entertainment. There are so many other things I could spend the extra $4000 on and still have all my movies ripped, and available nearly 100% of the time, nevermind the hundreds of dollars you'll be spending on keeping those 20 HDD's spinning nearly all the time.

[heffneil]

Fuzzy, I think you are right. I think I am going to build a more moderate machine (16 bays) on the cheap run unraid and give it a shot. I will populate it with a few drives and see how it goes (the $109 version) and see how it goes...

Neil

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Well, guess if you've got the money to throw at it, why not? I just don't see it as anywhere near worth it for home entertainment. There are so many other things I could spend the extra $4000 on and still have all my movies ripped, and available nearly 100% of the time, nevermind the hundreds of dollars you'll be spending on keeping those 20 HDD's spinning nearly all the time.

I agree completely, heck at $4000 you might as well just buy several Blu-ray/DVD carousels and just have your whole collection in hard copy shared to the house using some kind of video matrix!

[heffneil]

Some decent HD video matrix or other system would far surpass $4000 so lets not get too crazy here. This cheap box is still going to cost several thousands of dollars...

Neil

[heffneil]

Just an FYI in regards to the 20 pack of WD drives Amazon has them for $130 each. That's a better price point individually than the 20 at New Egg.

[Fuzzy]

I didn't say it was a great deal... just that it wasa better drive than spending $200 on a high speed drive that you won't need the speed from. Regardless, even funnier is that Newegg also sells that drive solo for $130. Go figure...

[davephan]

Originally Posted by heffneil

Fuzzy, I think you are right. I think I am going to build a more moderate machine (16 bays) on the cheap run unraid and give it a shot. I will populate it with a few drives and see how it goes (the $109 version) and see how it goes...

Neil

You could start off small with the free Basic 3 drive unRAID version. See if it works for you. Also, there is a $10 discount on unRAID registration.

I started with the free unRAID version, then bought two pre-configured Pro version USB jump drives. I powered down the unRAID computer, swapped the jump drive, and did a little parameter changes. UnRAID ran the parity again with the new USB jump drive, then it was ready.

I find it helpful to label the serial number for each hard drive, front and back with a label maker. I also make print outs of each unRAID GUI web page, printing each configuration screen.

Dave

[PiX64]

100% agree. Don't jump in with both feet until you try it. I tried the 3 disk free setup for about 2 weeks before i bought anything. ran it through some serious test. tested uploading to the unRaid box, streaming music, and streaming multiple blu-rays/DVDs around the house. Basically ran it through typical use, and then went a little bit further with my test cases.

I suspect you will be quite happy with the setup and end up purchasing it as i did.

~Pix64

[heffneil]

Here is a silly question and I am too intimidated to ask it on the unraid forums but here goes:

If you use the onboard SATA headers is there any good reason to use a hotswap chassis? It is my belief that you can not hot swap a drive if the sata controller doesn't support it. I would be afraid it would ruin the SATA port or the drive perhaps!

Neil

[madpoet]

I just use hotswap trays because they are convenient. I'm using the Icy Dock 5in3 cages (4 can fit in my CM Stacker).

[Fuzzy]

Hot swap support varries greatly between motherboard chipsets. And I think for it to work, you've got to have a supporting chipset, supporting drivers, and I'm pretty sure it has to run in AHCI mode. I'm not sure if the AHCI drivers in UnRaid support it, or even how to initiate a disconnect prior to removal.

[heffneil]

Right whatever fuzzy said but It seems like a kinda of a waste except for the amount of disks in a small enough space...

Anyway I have a question if I want to move a to a different chassis or a different motherboard how do you reassign the drives to a new sata port? Does the drive have to be on that specific port? If I want to move 6 drives to a controller that supports 20 or something how much of a challenge is that?

Thanks!

Neil

[Fuzzy]

I'm not certain, but I think unraid stores the necessary identification data on the drive, so it really shouldn't matter what port/hardware the drive is connected to.

[heffneil]

Ok but how does it know which drive to replace it as? The missing one? Just curious. Also what happens if the parity drive drops dead?

[davephan]

Originally Posted by heffneil

Ok but how does it know which drive to replace it as? The missing one? Just curious. Also what happens if the parity drive drops dead?

I first built up the 3 drive unRAID computer with smaller drives. I powered down the unRAID computer and swapped the 250 gig drive with a 2 TB drive. Then I powered up the unRAID computer. The new 2 TB parity drive rebuilt.

After the parity drive finished rebuilding, I swapped out the data drives. One at a time, allowing each to rebuild. I ended up with 2 TB drives for each of the three drives with no data loss.

I physically label each drive, front and back, with the serial number using a label maker. I print out the configuration each time I make an update. If a drive failed, you can power down the unRAID computer, easily identify the drive, replace the drive, and power up the unRAID computer. The replaced drive will then rebuild.

If the parity drive failed and one of the data drives failed, then the data on the single data drive would be lost, not the whole array of drives. The P+Q parity version coming out in the future, allows any two drives to fail with no data loss.

Dave