Help with Media storage

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auburnu008

n00b
Joined
Jul 8, 2008
Messages
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I have read for the past couple of weeks on what would be the best way to set up my media and I am still confused. I built my computer thanks to this great forum but am unsure what I need to do for the media storage I am trying to set up. I currently have 4 hard drives (2 1tb, 1 750, and 1 WD 640) in my case and am looking to add (5) more 1tb drives. Right now I have the drives hooked up as individual drives. I want them all to appear as 1 drive instead of having 9 drives showing up under "my computer". Is there a way to use JOBD so it only shows 1 drive? If so, if one drive goes bad, will all the drives data be lost too? What would you guys suggest? The fast WD drive is my OS and all the other drives are just movies. My motherboard only has 8 sata ports so I was going to buy the following:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816110002

And I am going to get this for my case:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811999141

My system is:
Q6600
ASUS P5Q Pro LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard
OCZ Reaper HPC Edition 8GB
ASUS HD 4850
Thermaltake W0116RU 750W
Thermaltake Armor Series VA8003BWS
2 DVD Burners

What do you think I should do? Thanks in advance for your help!
 
Ok, after reading all night I think my best option would be to set up a raid5. I have looked at my motherboards manual and it doesn't offer much help. Can someone please tell me exactly what I need to buy to set up a raid5 so all of my hard drives appear as one logical volume? Do I need to get a raid card? Any help is appreciated. Thank you.
 
Why not do a raid 1? Yeah, that means you'd have to buy more drives to have 5 actual storage drives, but if it was me, i'd want everything backed up.
 
If I did a windows home server I could just add it to my computer, correct? I do not want to have to buy/build another computer just to store my files. I do not share any files throughout the house on a network. Plus I like the idea of having everything one one location.

I assume you set it up with the OS on one drive and all of the other hard drives on a seperate letter? If I did use WHS would all of the date be lost on the drives? Thanks!
 
with JBOD, if you lose a hard drive you only lose the data on that hard drive

with raid 5, if you lose a hard drive you replace it with a good one, and it will rebuild the data (will take a long time) and you'll be back up and running. if you lose more than 1 drive tho... trouble

IMO: deff look into WHS. HP mediasmarts are awesome.

edit:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817332017

take a gander at that as well
 
I have room for 8 hard drives in my case, I would like to keep the drives in it if possible. Ultimately my main goal is to have the ability to add more hard drives to my case and have them appear as 1 hard drive on my computer. I do not care about having other computers being able to access the data. I just want to increase space on my computer. Backup is not a big factor either. Is adding WHS the easiest/best way to acheive this?
 
you cant add WHS to your existing computer, WHS is an OS itself, it isnt just a piece of software you can install onto your computer
 
WHS is a seperate operating system, and would be used on a seperate machine.

you can put all the drives internally - but you'll need either a sata controller, or a raid card that will do JBOD or raid5. Raid 5 will give you some redundancy against failing drives.

personally, I would not have that much storage without some kind of redundancy. what would you do if you lost 1tb+ of data?

so yea, find a raid card or a controller card that will handle atleast 9 drives (it WILL be expensive).
 
Ok, thanks for the help. What if I used this card:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815121009
and just hooked all the movie hard drives up to it? Would that work? Would I just run it as JBOD? So they would all appear under the same drive letter, but if one drive failed all of the other drives would be safe? I am sorry for the noob questions, it is just this is one area I have never learned or really understood. Thanks.
 
that card does not say anything about being able to do jbod

seems like just a cheap way to add a bunch of sata ports through pci (which would be slower than it's native pci-x interface)
 
Ok, so what would be the cheapest/easiest way to add more hard drives to my case and have them appear as 1 hard drive on my computer? I am so confuses at this point. Can someone give me some advice?
 
Well lets see:
- If you're using hard drives of the exact same size, you can always just setup a giant RAID 0 array using your mobo's onboard RAID chip. That'll probably be the easiest and cheapest way to get all the hard drives to show up as one volume. However that is a very very bad idea if you want your data safe since if a single drive dies in RAID 0, all data stored in other drives are gone.
- You could just set up a JBOD array but you'll need to buy a controller that supports JBOD. However, I think there's a way to setup a JBOD array within Windows itself without buying a controller but I don't know of it and have yet to try a JBOD setup in Windows. See what Google turn up about that.
- If you want some level of uptime and redundancy (remember that RAID is not backup), then RAID 5 is a good choice as well. If you're fine with slow speeds and about 15% to 50% CPU usage at all times (depending on the CPU and the size of the array), then software RAID 5 is a good choice. I don't think the ICH10R that the Asus P5Q Pro has any sort of drive limits for its RAID array. If it doesn't, then just grab a cheap software RAID5 card. However if you want fast speeds and no CPU usage for the array, then get a true hardware RAID 5 card. Those cost around ~$300 for a 4 port and ~$450 for a 8 port card.
 
i got my highpoint 2220 which supports RAID 5 for $100 shipped on the BST, i have seen Perc5/i for around $150 that are nice hardware raid 5 cards..


its not "that" expensive.

also JBOD, 1 drive failure and you loose the entire array also....
 
You could just do Disk Spanning with Dynamic Disk in Windows. Does not provide any type of redundancy but if you lose a drive you wont lose everything, just what is on that drive. And you wont have to spend money on expensive controllers for raid5
 
nitrobass24 said:
You could just do Disk Spanning with Dynamic Disk in Windows. Does not provide any type of redundancy but if you lose a drive you wont lose everything, just what is on that drive. And you wont have to spend money on expensive controllers for raid5
Click to expand...

I thought you could not do it in Vista? I am searching right now. I went to disk management and could not find out how to do it. That sounds like exactly what I am looking for.
 
Do you have any old parts from a previous computer?

You really are looking for exactly what WHS excels at. The system requirements are quite low, an old AMD or P4 system would work fine. Just install any add-in card with more SATA slots, hook up your drives, and you're set. The OS is $99.

If you begged I even have a couple of A64 mobo/cpu/ram sets laying around and I'd send you one.
 
[LYL]Homer;1033559435 said:
Do you have any old parts from a previous computer?

You really are looking for exactly what WHS excels at. The system requirements are quite low, an old AMD or P4 system would work fine. Just install any add-in card with more SATA slots, hook up your drives, and you're set. The OS is $99.

If you begged I even have a couple of A64 mobo/cpu/ram sets laying around and I'd send you one.
Click to expand...

I appreciate the offer. I might look into that down the road. Right now I am going to see if I can get around having to seperate the data from my computer. Has anyone used Disk Spanning with Dynamic Disk in Vista premium 64bit? I read that it is only available in vista ultimate. PLEASE tell me I can do this. Thanks for all the replys.
 
auburnu008 said:
I thought you could not do it in Vista? I am searching right now. I went to disk management and could not find out how to do it. That sounds like exactly what I am looking for.
Click to expand...

I havent done it since XP but im pretty sure you can do it vista.
If you want parity you could always use an extra disk for parity using flexraid.

[LYL]Homer;1033559435 said:
Do you have any old parts from a previous computer?

You really are looking for exactly what WHS excels at. The system requirements are quite low, an old AMD or P4 system would work fine. Just install any add-in card with more SATA slots, hook up your drives, and you're set. The OS is $99.

If you begged I even have a couple of A64 mobo/cpu/ram sets laying around and I'd send you one.
Click to expand...


I agree WHS is exactly the right product for the situation. but as he stated he doesnt want another box.
You could run WHS in a VM I beleive VMWare workstation allows for direct disk access.
 
you could just mount the drives as folder paths and not drive letters...

so in your C: drive you could have a Folder for Videos that is actually a new drive

it would look like 1 drive


+1 more for WHS for what you want...
 
I thought I could use partition magic to allocate the drives into 1 but I don't think I can. This is all over my head. I am just going to install the drives as individual drives on my computer. I wanted to have them all as one big drive but this stuff is over my head. Thanks for all the help. I appreciate it.
 
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