Question about storage

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chinkecheese

Gawd
Joined
Oct 23, 2007
Messages
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Hey guys, I'm still new with my htpc. One of the questions I had was how does everyone here deal with storage of media?

Yes, I guess I could buy 3x 3TB HDDs for my storage to store everything. Is that what everyone does?

I also thought about getting cloud storage, does anyone use it? Can I stream my movies/music directly from it?

What do you recommend

thanks
 
cloud storage has monthly fees and is not suitable for videos. It would also likely be slow with HD videos. I think most people make a NAS as you want your HTPC to be small and quiet.
 
right on - thanks

are there any new storage solutions coming out? Or do I just need to buy a bunch of 3tb hds
 
you could buy 4tb disks. Seems 5tb disks should come in the near future also.
 
I did what silk186 mentioned--I bought a NAS enclosure and sufficient capacity disks for my personal media playback, the NAS is doing RAID1 currently, and also serves as the local backup device for our household devices.

But I also have a cloud storage account with crashplan--got a good deal on one of their packages a while back and decided to keep it; peace of mind and all. But only really use it if I need to restore files, not for streaming media.
 
I have a home server with about 8 TB of storage, protected by parity redundancy. Used to use Flexraid for pooling and parity, but just switched to PoolHD + Snapraid.
 
Raid 1 is not ideal for storage of media as it wastes too much space. Raid 1 is good for mission critical files that can't easily be replaced, such as documents and project files (and even then, I'd just use cloud storage for that). For storing media, using parity redundancy is the best trade-off between protection and storage space. Furthermore, using non-striped parity-based redundancy, like that offered by Unraid, Flexraid, and Snapraid, is much better than using striped hardware raid5/6, because with a media server you don't need the extra write performance that hardware raid gives you (because the nature of a media server is that it is "write-once, read-many"), and you certainly don't want the liability of losing your entire array if you lose more drives than your parity can handle. With the non-striped variety, if you ever lose enough drives to cause a failure, you only lose THAT drive's contents.
 
Valaire said:
Raid 1 is not ideal for storage of media as it wastes too much space. Raid 1 is good for mission critical files that can't easily be replaced, such as documents and project files (and even then, I'd just use cloud storage for that). For storing media, using parity redundancy is the best trade-off between protection and storage space. Furthermore, using non-striped parity-based redundancy, like that offered by Unraid, Flexraid, and Snapraid, is much better than using striped hardware raid5/6, because with a media server you don't need the extra write performance that hardware raid gives you (because the nature of a media server is that it is "write-once, read-many"), and you certainly don't want the liability of losing your entire array if you lose more drives than your parity can handle. With the non-striped variety, if you ever lose enough drives to cause a failure, you only lose THAT drive's contents.
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True. But alas, in my case, I went with a 2-bay NAS. :(
 
teh_chem said:
True. But alas, in my case, I went with a 2-bay NAS. :(
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Ouch. :p I suspect you will outgrow that quickly. When you do, you should just look into building a small computer instead of getting one of those things.
 
Valaire said:
Ouch. :p I suspect you will outgrow that quickly. When you do, you should just look into building a small computer instead of getting one of those things.
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I'm not too worried. The unit satisfied all of my requirements, and I couldn't be happier with it. :)
 
Are you guys concerned about the size of 4K media? I hope that it doesn't get to the point that it becomes impossible to store things in 4K.
 
chinkecheese said:
Are you guys concerned about the size of 4K media? I hope that it doesn't get to the point that it becomes impossible to store things in 4K.
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I'm not. I don't even care about current bluray rips. I probably only have a few movies I bought and ripped that are even at 720p; most are DVD rips. But then again, I'll admit to not really caring about having the highest-def video files.
 
teh_chem said:
I'm not too worried. The unit satisfied all of my requirements, and I couldn't be happier with it. :)
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I guess I made an assumption about your usage scenario given the HTPC forum, if that is not the case, congrats--you've escaped a money sink. :)
 
I use 5 local 2TB disks that backup to a Synology 1812, which then uses Plex to stream to my other TVs and my Roku. Works well. I put the media I don't care too much about on a separate FreeNAS box.

A NAS device is not a viable backup if it's the only copy of the media.
 
I just stuff drives in the case. I have three right now but could hold another 3. And its not a big case. Not loud at all In fact you cant hear a thing and the HTPC serves as a server for anything else in the house. Cloud storage will not work for media. It would take 3 years to upload what I have. I rip mainly 720s. The new board I have is ITX and has 7 SATA 6.0 ports
 
Valaire said:
I guess I made an assumption about your usage scenario given the HTPC forum, if that is not the case, congrats--you've escaped a money sink. :)
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:D No worries! It's tough to beat money sinks in tech enthusiast areas, that's for sure!
 
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