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Building storage for DVD library.

J

Joni Nitro

Gawd
Joined
Mar 20, 2005
Messages
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In preperations for spending the next 2yrs living in Korea in a dorm room I want to eliminate as much clutter as possible. I want to compress about 150 dvds into a high quality format and store on HD. So I am looking for adivice on the setup.
I will be using a dual cpu system for this. I will have two AMD Athlon MP1900's with 4gb of ram. I want to use a DVDRW combo drive so I am not loaded down with optical drives.

So what advice can you guys give me on setting this up. What type of SATA controlers are good but not going to kill my wallet? I am thinking 1-1.5TB should be a decent starting size. I have used Fair Use2 and compressed DVD's down to 2gb and still seems like good quality. Let me have some input. Thanks!
 
If you can live with a bunch of seperate disks or software raid, the Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8's are cheap and good. I own one and highly recommend them for everything. About $100-135 for 8 ports; I bought mine at wiredzone. It comes with 8 cables. It's cheaper elsewhere, now, though - I just got it there because it was cheapest at the time. Linux software raid plus this card = winner.

If you need Windows on the machine this will go in, and want a single large volume, Highpoint makes a line of good raid controllers at about $250. The 2220 or 2320 will be good.

In terms of drives, I'd recommend WD's 320 GB RE drives. Cheap, fast, big, good - pick four ;) You'll also need a beefy PSU - start a thread there or take the easy way out and get a large Enermax or PCP&C.

 
They will work with any kind of sata. Sata1 @ 1.5gbps, sata2.5 @ 3gbps, whatever. I'd suggest buying your drives from ZipZoomFly, though - they're the only retailer that packs their drives in foam as the manufacturers recommend. Here's their 320 RE for $129 shipped. They have the samsung you linked for $100 shipped. Those are nice quiet drives, even though the capacity isn't the greatest.

The reason I suggested an addon card is so that you'd be able to hold more drives, and potentially run the drives in Raid 5. This would give you protection against the failure of one drive, and create one large volume (or drive letter) rather than several smaller volumes. One of the 2220 or 2320 will work in almost any motherboard - the 2320 can go in any x4 or larger slot on a pci-express board, and the 2220 works with any regular pci slot with room beyond the end of it.

If you're not interested in the redundancy of raid 5 or having a single large volume, pick whatever drives fit your budget and make sure you have enough power and cooling for the drives.

 
It looks like I am going to try and setup a Raid 5 array. I may not be able to go as big initially but I can increase later. So if I used 4 250gb HD in Raid 5 that would give me 750gb of storage right? So this will save my data so long as only one HD goes and is replaced correct? I would hate to go through the process of compress all this data just to have it lost.

So what kind of Raid 5 cards should I look at. I would do a software Raid to cut cost some and the dual cpu's should handle it ok I think.
 
Correct, 750GB of storage, you can lose one disk and replace it and not lose data. I'd suggest that you don't compress the data - just copy it to disk. This will give you a lot faster ripping process. But that's just me - I use flac for music ;)

I'd look at the Highpoint cards I mentioned. They're about the cheapest you can get, and you get some pretty good performance out of them. Here's the 2320 (pci express) for $250; here's the 2220 for $247. They're pretty much the same card, except for the interface. If you've got a board with a pci express x4, x8, or x16 slot free, I'd recommend using that. Pci express has much more bandwidth than plain pci, so it'd take away a limiting factor. It won't matter too much when you're using it as a media storage dump, but it can't hurt, given that it's $3 difference ;) What hardware are you using this with?

 
It *would* work, but I'm not a fan of XFX's raid gear; it's raid 3 instead of raid 5, and it's only 5 ports. $80 is an okay price, though. I don't think you can expand an array with that card - if you put N disks in now, you can't move to N+1 later. The Highpoint card can do that and it's still relatively cheap, which is why I recommend it so often.

 
unhappy_mage said:
If you've got a board with a pci express x4, x8, or x16 slot free, I'd recommend using that. Pci express has much more bandwidth than plain pci, so it'd take away a limiting factor.
Click to expand...

Just so I'm clear on this, that PCI Express 4x Highpoint card WILL work in a 16x slot, right?
 
That's absolutely correct. I'm not sure whether it knows how to drop down to x1, though, so if you've got a board with only 20 lanes where it has a move around option on the 2 x16 slots you may need to set it to x8/x8 to get it to work. I would be somewhat surprised if this were the case, though - every other card I know of can drop to x1 if it needs to. And x1 is 200 MB/s in both directions, which is plenty for a raid array. I'd welcome knowledge on this; I know it'll work with the SLI switch set one way or another, but I'm not sure it'll work in an x1 slot. It won't break anything to try, in any case; so I'd love to hear from you ;)

 
I dont have pci-x so that limits my options some.

Those highpoint cards are pci-x so is there another card I should be looking at?
 
The Highpoint 2220 will fit in a standard PCI slot and run at standard PCI speeds. The portion farthest from the back of the case will hang out the end of the slot, and that's okay.

 
mage,

Thanks for the explanation on both the PCI Express and PCIx compatibities.
 
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