Storage Solutions?

A few months ago I built a new gaming rig. I am now wanting to use my old gaming rig as an HTPC. It has an FX-8350, 16GB of DDR3 and an RX 580.

What HDDs do you guys use for internal storage on HTPCs? As we all are, I am looking for lots of space and fast speeds. Should I get a Western Digital blue, black or red? What about several Velociraptors for the 10,000 RPMs? Are there better options out there like enterprise drives?

For my HTPC i went WD Purple drives for anything to do with the video portion (Live TV buffer, recording, etc). They are surveillance drives and are made to be used 24/7.

You don't need speed for storage. 5400 or even slower drives work perfectly fine for streaming music/movies. Plus you don't have to deal with the heat created by faster drives.

Personally, I buy based on size, warranty, and price.

I have no brand preference. I've used them all over the years, and aside from a few problem models (and all brands have had issues with at least one drive/model), I've not had any consistent issues with any particular brand.

A 100mb/s bitrate 4K is still only (100 / 8 = ) 12.5MB/s. A 20mb/s bitrate 1080p is only 2.5MB/s. As you can see, for viewing pleasure, read speed makes little difference.

For movies, I would try to limit to as few discs as possible since waiting for drives to spin up is very noticeable. For music I would recommend as SSD as it makes skipping and random play instant. Movies you aren’t skipping around like you are with music.

For backup what I would do is use Microsoft storage Spaces and just add drives as needed so you only need as much space as the actual amount of space you are using.

You can have your main drive be 10TB or whatever, but just keep adding 3or 4TB drives to the Storage Spaces pool as needed.

Loosing all the work of ripping or downloading and organizing could be a major bummer.

I am wanting to rip all my DVDs to an internal HDD. Is there any good ripping software out there?

For ripping I'm a big proponent of makemkv. https://www.makemkv.com/ It perpetually free in beta but you can buy a license if you want to support the developer. One thing to note is if you want all the dvd extras like the menus and what not then this will not work and you will need to use something that makes an ISO such as DvdFab . If you want just the movie like myself then this will work great.

For storage I would buy the cheapest drive that stores all your data. As other have pointed out speed is not an issue so you don't need to spend extra money on WD blacks/Velociraptors or ssd.

Assuming you are using the HTPC as we do and only use it occasionally you might throw a ssd in as the boot disk and turn it off when not in use to save some power. Alternatively you could turn the FX-8350 in to a nas device and use a device such as a raspberry pi as the htpc and just stream you media from the FX-8350 using Plex or Kodi . This is more inline with that I have setup at my house but does add an machine to the mix.

I usually pick based on size, reliability, price. This has some good real world reliability numbers for various drive sizes and manufacturers.

i have 4x 8tb's in a cheapskate NAS, never had a problem. They are all shucked wd 8tb deals from bby.

McClintoc said:

I am wanting to rip all my DVDs to an internal HDD. Is there any good ripping software out there?

Click to expand...

For DVD, just about anything can rip that, since CSS encryption breaking was made open source 20 years ago.

Bluray was more robust and the needs updated decryption keys released for new discs. AnyDVD and MakeMV are big players.

For 4K, you need updated software such as the 2 I listed above, and you also need specfic bluray drives with specific firmware revisions which are getting very hard to find now that consumers are looking for them and manufacturers are making sure the firmware isn't shipped anymore.

I use DVD Fab.