HTPC Advice Needed Regarding Data Storage (1 Viewer)

[AlienAndy]

Hi all.


I've been racking my brains on my little problem now for ages. Basically I am a Media Portal fanatic. The only time I watch Live TV is when the footy's on! My current main pc/HTPC system is a pretty powerful one contained in a shuttle case. Like so...

Gigabyte Matx MB
AMD 6000+ Dual Core CPU
4Gb DDR2 Ram
2Tb Hard Drive Storage ( 3 x 500Gb Internal and 1 x 500Gb External )
DVD-RW Drive
Vista Home Premium 64bit
Media Portal

My problem is that I have pretty much filled up all hard drive space with programming etc that I want to keep. Now I am obviously prepared to lose the shuttle case for a larger one, but it's the storage options that I'm wondering about. For a start, I really need to backup all that I have at the moment, which in itself will be a nightmare! But after this, I want a system whereby I have more than 2Tb of storage plus the same again for backup!

The cheapest option would be a good number of internal hard drives as they are cheaper than external. But how many sata sockets can you get on a motherboard. My current one has 4. Can you get motherboards with 8?

Would a Raid 1 config be of any use to me? ( Never used Raid yet, but I'm certainly willing to give that a go )

Anyone have any suggestions? ( Reasonable ones that is! )

No, I'm not prepared to delete what I have. So that is NOT an option.

Just for information, my main pc is in our living room at the opposite corner to the tv. My NVidia 8600GT Fanless graphics card has 3 outputs, so I have one running to my tv which Media Portal runs on the secondary monitor setting. So basically I don't have a seperate htpc.

 

[revs]

I have a gigabyte motherboard that has 4 SATA I and 4 SATA 2 connectors. So thats 8! The SATA I connectors are 150MB/s whereas SATA 2 is double that - however for storing video this is not a problem.

 

[AlienAndy]

Hi Revs.

What Motherboard is it you have?
I think it certainly looks like I need to replace my current shuttle with something bigger!

 

[ThaClown]

I recently finished my Server, I had the exact same problem as you..
4x 500GB HDD's full with movies, TV Series and Music, and no backup.

I bought a HighPoint RocketRAID 2320 card (http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA/rr2320.html) via internet (second hand for about 120 euro)
And decided to buy four 1TB HDD's and put them in RAID5 under XP Pro
I put this in an old PC case I had with my old mobo/Athlon XP 3200+ and with my Floppy DTV-C and a 450w PSU.
Connect it to a router and put it in the storage room.
Ok, I did spend over 600 euro but now I have perfectly safe server with 3TB space wich acts as a TV server as well.
Also my RAID card has 8 sata ports so I could expand to 8x 1GB HDD in RAID5 if I wanted.

I see it as an investment for the future (hope to make 6 years use of it at least)
I can add extra clients when needed should I move to a bigger house and I might use it as a webserver in the future.

 

[AlienAndy]

I recently finished my Server, I had the exact same problem as you..
4x 500GB HDD's full with movies, TV Series and Music, and no backup.

I bought a HighPoint RocketRAID 2320 card (http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA/rr2320.html) via internet (second hand for about 120 euro)
And decided to buy four 1TB HDD's and put them in RAID5 under XP Pro
I put this in an old PC case I had with my old mobo/Athlon XP 3200+ and with my Floppy DTV-C and a 450w PSU.
Connect it to a router and put it in the storage room.
Ok, I did spend over 600 euro but now I have perfectly safe server with 3TB space wich acts as a TV server as well.
Also my RAID card has 8 sata ports so I could expand to 8x 1GB HDD in RAID5 if I wanted.

I see it as an investment for the future (hope to make 6 years use of it at least)
I can add extra clients when needed should I move to a bigger house and I might use it as a webserver in the future.

Now that's a nice setup mate!
Yes, I currently have around 300+ Movies and 1000's of hours of TV series. i.e. ALL the Star Treks, X-Files, UFO, Space 1999, Minder etc.etc. I also have piles of albums, but they are no longer a problem as I painfully trancoded all of the music in mp3 format to equivilent ogg files. So I went from 47Gb to around 22Gb! Pity I can't compress the TV stuff like that!

I think your setup is perfect and definitely something I am now contemplating in doing myself. My setup seemed perfect at the start, indeed, I thought it was an overkill! But it's surprising how much storage you end up using when you start grabbing all your favourite TV. Like I said, I am addicted to my Media Portal HTPC. I even get really pissed off when I am forced to watch something on TV with adverts! Not used to adverts anymore lol!

Thanks for your input mate. Much appreciated.

 

[ThaClown]

hehe exactly the same here... I had my TV reception broken for a month and I really did not miss it at all! Anlmost never watch Tv anymore
And my girl always askes "Why save all those TV Series? You can never watch them all!" but its just like collecting cards, its fun to have em complete...

 

[AlienAndy]

You have got to laugh. Women never understand do they? Until of course, they want to watch something that you happen to have on your Media Portal. lol. Bless em ay?

Yes, the only concern with having so much is having a hard drive failure. I think that's why I am now looking to do something with Raid. I am new to this, but I'm a pretty fast learner. I've just been looking into that RocketRAID 2320 of yours and Raid 5. Sounds good to me!

Collecting TV Series, especially my favourite shows is definitely an addiction! I must admit to loving it when people moan about how normal TV on Saturday nights is so shit, and I just sit there smiling to myself.... not on my TV it isn't!

 

[kesar]

Here you'll find a good guide for the task.

 

[phertiker]

My advice is to not use a Raid card of any kind. If your card dies, you MUST buy that exact same card again or your data is useless to you. Perhaps this is rare, yes, but considering you're doing this to take care of your data, it just doesn't make sense (at least to me) to have a failure point like that.

Linux software Raid is easy, robust, and fast. I configured a 2.2 terabyte Raid 5 array on a dual-core p4d 3.2ghz machine with a gig and a half of RAM. It runs great, although it uses almost a whole core during big writes. I'm using the machine mainly because I had it laying around and it had enough SATA ports, but if I want to expand it's easy enough to buy a pci-e SATA controller card.

The big advantage here is that I can easily replace any part of the array if it fails, up to and including the machine itself. Just move the drives to another linux box with enough SATA ports and make sure mdadm is running, array is intact.

I can also expand my array on-the-fly as I choose, and by using the XFS file system I can easily expand partitions out to match the new array size. (ext3 and reiser also support partition expansion, I just like XFS).

If you go this route and need any help using mdadm, I would be glad to help you. It's easy once you get the hang of it and, dare i say, even a little fun?

 

[AlienAndy]

Bloody hell. There are just so many routes I can go here!
I am going to have to sit down and really consider my options. I have to admit that I haven't really enjoyed piddling around with computers much in recent times, before Media Portal came along. But since Media Portal, I have really appreciated the technology again! I definitely predict that all the blu-ray disks and beyond will end up totally phased out and eventually every house will have it's own built-in huge database that will be the owners media centre containing telecommunications i.e. Video Phone, Internet, TV, Photo Albums etc.etc. Our Grandchildren will laugh at us in years to come when we mention blu-ray disks!

Anyway, for now I will just have to make do with a few more Terrabytes of storage!

Thanks to you all so far for helping me out, it is VERY much appreciated.

Nice one.