How are you storing your ripped movies??

[Brent94Z]

I use AnyDVDHD along with CloneDVD2 to copy (and compress to DVD5) the DVD and menus to an external hard drive on the Sage HTPC server maintaining normal DVD file structure. I do this from my main computer in my office and just send them to the external USB hard drive at my HTPC in the living room over the network.

I have a 2nd USB external hard drive connected to the HTPC and use SyncBackSE to backup nightly the 1st external hard drive with all the DVD rips.

Seems to work OK and I went this route because I wanted to save a little on hard drive space. While there is some loss in quality in making the movies 4.7gig, it isn't unacceptable IMO.

[heffneil]

It really sounds interesting I am just about to pull the trigger. I thought about using a 7200 RPM drive for the parity thinking it would be faster. I was wondering if unraid supports dual network...

Thanks,

Neil

[Fuzzy]

I think you'd be better off using the 7200 RPM drive as a cache drive. Having the parity drive faster than the actual data drives won't really make any difference, as the write throughput to the parity drive will be limited by the read+write speed of the data drives, plus calculation time. the cache drive, on the other hand, will actually be able to USE the added speed, as it is basically written to full speed, limited only by network and system overhead.

[davephan]

Make sure that your parity drive is equal to or larger than your largest data drive.

If you have a spare USB flash drive laying around, you can download the free 3 drive basic version to try it out. You will also need the sys linux boot utility, and the preclear_disk.sh file, which are also free. You need to make sure that your system board can boot to the USB flash drive and that unRAID can recognize your drive controller(s).

I tried it out with a three small drives in the range of 160 - 250 gigs, then migrated my data to 2 TB drives. It's a slow process to build up the system, especially if you preclear one drive at a time. I have 1 parity and 4 data drives now, all 2 TB drives. I am working on preclearing my 5th data drive now and have several drives to go after my 5th drive is added to the array.

Dave

[madpoet]

Dave, you know you can preclear up to 6 at once, right?

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by 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...

I've always found this funny that most of the 20 drive packs work out to the same as buying individual drives.

[davephan]

Originally Posted by madpoet

Dave, you know you can preclear up to 6 at once, right?

I've heard you can preclear more than one drive at a time. I don't know the console command line for preclearing multiple drives. I also don't know if preclearing two drives at once would take twice as long, the same time, or somewhere in between.

From the console command line I use syntax like:

cd /boot
preclear_disk.sh /dev/sdg

Dave

[madpoet]

Just did 5... it's independent, doesn't add time. If you are on the unRaid server you use Alt-F1 through Alt-F6 to get up to 6 logins. Just log in to each one and kick off a new preclear.

[davephan]

Originally Posted by madpoet

Just did 5... it's independent, doesn't add time. If you are on the unRaid server you use Alt-F1 through Alt-F6 to get up to 6 logins. Just log in to each one and kick off a new preclear.

Thanks for the info. I will preclear more than one drive at a time for future drives.

Dave