Blu-Ray/DVD file 'server'

U

UT-Jackal

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 2, 2004
Messages
373
Hey guys,

I've had my collection of DVD's ripped to hard drives on my HTPC for a while now, but now that I am buying blu-rays, i started to back them up as well. As all of you know, they take up a lot of space meaning i'll need multiple 1Tb+ drives. So i want to do a file server so that the box sitting next to my TV isn't stacked with HDD's.

I know nothing of servers, and was wondering what recommendations, or requirements i would have to meet to stream blu-ray's over my network to my HTPC. I have an old pc rocking 2 gigs of ram and an AMD3000+, but i don't know if that would be sufficient. My three other PC's run Vista, and are all pretty new. Basically, i don't mind parting out things from my other computers and upgrading them, but i don't want to throw a lot of money into this server if at all possible (other than for HDD's).

I would rather buy the drives one at a time rather than buying say 10 1Tb's right now, but be able to add in the drives as i get them. It's easier to let go of $100 every month than $1000 right now for me. ;)

I don't mean to be vague or come in here with such little knowledge, but the whole server thing is new to me.

Thanks
 
Dig around here a page or 2 deeper into the threads. That is a common enough thing that is done around here.

You seem like a good candidate for Windows Home Server. Your old AMD box would be more than enough to run a server on. I would recommend Gigabit ethernet for streaming HD content though, so you may need to do some updating of your network components.

Ockie will prolly jump in shortly with some more suggestions. He seems to be the most knowledgeable regular around here for this kind of thing.

Don
 
I was in your position about 6 months ago. I had used and built WHS boxes for other and I really liked the software so I used it for my server. I like it much better for a media server then say sever 2003 with RAID5 cause you dont have to worry about RAID and you dont need expensive hardware.
Your AMD box will be great for WHS
You can check out my build here
 
I will agree with nitrobass24 here. I am damned good candidate for WHS myself, and acutally just received my 3x 120day free trials of WHS from Microsoft...each of which can be re-armed at the 120day mark for another 120days...and the keys can be rolled from one copy to another...so I effectively have 3years of WHS at my disposal. It's a bummer that WHS isn't a part of the ActionPack, or the MSDN program yet though, as it seems to be the only one.

Anyways, trying to not get too far off topic...I am drinking some decent beer :p

I am sure axan, Ockie, Blue Fox, and others might chime in on this as well, but I will throw my hat into the ring. With WHS, you can get away with not having to buy the expensive LSI/Adaptec/Intel/Areca controllers to do proper hardware RAID levels. This is because of how WHS handles storage. In a typical machine, you'd require a RAID controller (hardware or software based) to properly aggregate the capacity of each of the drives in the RAID set into a lerger storage volume. WHS does the same thing by adding all drives into a storage pool. You can add additional drives to this pool at any time. You can also deem certain folders or files as important enough to be replicated elsewhere in the storage pool. WHS is intelligent enough to know that the duplicate copies should not be kept on the same physical drive as the original copy, and thus, it will place the duplicate on a separate physical drive. This way, when any one drive containing original (source) date dies, the duplicated data is still available to you on another physical drive.

Normally, this type of redundancy is accomplished by doing something like RAID-1, 1E, 3, 4, 5, 10, 50, 6, etc. all of these schemes involve multiple hard drives acting as one logical drive, and either the machine's CPU doing the copy/parity calculations, or the CPU in the RAID controller is doing the calculations (obviously a custom ASIC and the cache RAM, etc that goes into designing a specific solution such as this also costs more). On top of this, you have to purchase drives that will contain copies of data (in the case of RAID 1, 1E, 10, 50, 6, etc), and will not allow you to access the physical capacity of those drives. Your ROI is increased only by the assurance that your data resides on a controller that is specifically designed to perform this task. There's many features that come with a hardware RAID controller, and they are too numerous to list here, so I will cut that part short.

In contrast to a hardware RAID controller, WHS uses it's data replication system to ensure that duplicate data is placed on a separate physical drive from the source drive. Because these are essentially copy operations, there's no great amount of overhead (ie, parity to calculate) to this process...well, no more than doing double writes on important data. But, the large benefit is that it's only doing multiple writes on the data that you deem to be important, unlike RAID levels that offer a 1:1 redundancy, which is duplicating ever block of data, on every write..not just what you think is important. On top of this, also consider that you'd normally require the RAID controller to aggregate your storage array into a larger physical volume (well in truth, you could to Dynamic Disks, or GPT, but this offers you no inherent redundancy...you'd have to do that yourself). The way that WHS pools the drive capcities together means that you really only have to decide what data is, in fact, important to you, and what you wouldn't mind to lose, should a drive failure occur.

With specific regard to streaming BD/HD media over a network...toss wireless out the window, even wireless N. I have a Cisco Aironet 1250 at work that I got and setup(because I like decent toys at work), and neither the 5GHz antenna, not the 2.4GHz antenna can properly stream an HD stream over N, even to my quad core laptop...so just forget that, until we get a decently fast, and low latency wireless connection standard. You will want a GbE connection to each client machine that you intend to stream to, and ideally, multiple bonded NIC interfaces on the media server (although if you're just going at any given time, form the server to one or two clients, you'd be fine with one NIC), a switch that can do 802.3ad (link aggregation), and some Cat5e (at a minimum if this is existing wiring, Cat6 if you're doing new runs). The best scenario would be to have any more than one client to be streaming data off of different source drives (so that there is no drive contention from the source/media server). However, that might now be realistic/financially possible. If you're just looking to get started, here's what I'd recommend:

Server contains a PCI-E or PCI-X Intel Pro 1000XT or MT NIC
Cat5E cabling
1GbE switch, enough ports to handle your server + clients
enough HDD space to handle your current + planned near-future data needs
cheap 4/8/12/16/20/24 (whatever your current + near future planned needs are) SATA controller, PCI-E or PCI-X
Windows Home server
good idea of what you want duplicated, and what you don't
Decent client machines to stream video to, also with GbE, although these do not need to have add-in NICs, onboard will be fine

The reason for adding an Intel standalone NIC, and the model that I selected, is that onboard NICs, just like onboard RAID, and onboard audio, chew up processing cycles. Depending on how many drives you have in your array, how often you access your replicated data, and how often you're streaming to more than one client, you'll be chewing up some CPU resources, just from scheduled IO requests coming in from the in-system component drives (in the server, itself), let alone the client machines requesting data streams from drives. It is important on the server to have as much of your resources available to provide the requested content to your clients, and an add-in RAID card will provide this offload for you, and get you closer to the maximum transmissions speeds of 1GbE. On the client side, it's not nearly as important. They will see no service interruption as long as the server is capable of handling all of the traffic. The data streams that the clients are requesting (even BD/HD content) won't saturate their 1GbE connections. However, you may see saturation on the server side, depending on how many clients are doing simulataneous accesses. You may also see disk contention, if say, you have regular DVD and BD/HD media on the same physical drive, and two clients requesting access. If you find that you're getting network contention, but not disk contention, jst add another NIC. If you find that you're having the opposite issue, and the disk is getting hammered, you could add more drives to the storage pool, or you could front end the WHS storage pool with a cheaper hardware RAID card, like the Dell Perc5/i. RAM is more important than CPU in the server, and as nitrobass24 said, your existing setup would make a good WHS base.

Hope it helps, I know it's kind of long...but I know how it is to want a decent suggestion, and just get a bunch of one liners that lead you in a million different directions. If anything, perhaps I have convinced you that what I have suggested requires further thought on your part, with a clear goal in mind. Hell, if all I did is convince you to NOT do what I suggested, then at least you'll have a better direction than before you posted this thread. Ayways, I do hope it helped.
 
Wait a second...no $1k+ RAID card? Heathen! ;)

Those Supermicro 8 port controller cards are pretty popular considering they can be had for under $100. Might want to look into that if you go for the WHS route.
 
there's only a select few that can afford that kind of hardware, and coming from someone that completely understands high end RAID cards, and enterprise level RAID arrays (and loves them very much :)) I am very much in the same boat as the OP on this one. My needs for more storage capacity (currently) outweighs my need for a high end controller to facilitate my wants. I can also very much relate to the budgetary concerns in his request.

+1 for the SM 8port. great way to add 8 ports to an existing config, especially given the parameters he's specified.

Oh, and I never claimed to be anything but a Heathen, especially on All Hallow's Eve / El dia de la muerte / Halloween ;)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top