Huge Storage on your mid/full tower

[zewt]

I love being able to rip and store my DVDs for my HTPC (xlobby rocks). And for the last couple years I have been building RAIDS to hold my precious DVDs.

Lately I have changed philosophy and am just using non-RAID raw drives.

Recently I came across a product at my local FRY's that I loved. A SATA backplane that plugs into the 5.25 slots of a case.

view it here:

http://www.cwol.com/serial-ata/4-drive-sata-backplane.htm

I simply love this backplane. I bought a full tower with eight 5.25 slots, put in two 4-port sata cards, and 2 of the 4-drive SATA backplanes, and 8 - 320Gig SATA drives.

Approximate cost break-down
SATA Backplane (at Frys) $130 ea.
SATA 4-port PCI card (zipzoomfly.com) $60 ea.
320Gig SATA HD (zipzoomfly.com) $140 ea.

Total cost for 1.2 Terabytes: ~$750.
Total cost for 2.4 Terabytes: ~$1500.

Of course you can use less drives, there is a 3 slot backplane for around $100, and you can get drives from ebay for very cheap if you are willing to take chances.

Essentially I now have 2.4 Terabytes of active in pc storage. But actually it is unlimited as the individual drives are easy to pop in and out, and hot-swapable.

Harddrive storage is now so cheap, I rip to harddrive exclusively, and keep a list of what movies are on what drive, with a master list. When a drive gets full I just pull it out, put it on the shelf, and stick in a new blank drive.

When I want to watch a movie from a shelved drive I just plug it back in. The SATA backplane drives are hot-swapable, just pop them in and out.

I also keep certain movies on certain drives, for example I have all my Samurai movies on a drive - all the Zatoichi's and Lone Wolf and Cub series. All my TV series such as Farscape, Bob Newhart, and Inspector Morse on their own drives, and so forth.

I have a master movie list that tells me what harddrive a movie is on, and it takes a couple minutes to pop in the correct drive.

But with 2.4 TeraBytes you can have a lot of movies available. And with 300+Gig drives available for under $150 adding more quick storage is easy.

[GFORCE]

I Run 24x 300Gb Sata Drives

6 Promise SATA Raid Cards.

also 4x 250Gb IDE Drives with onboard Raid.

i run two of these servers based in Rackmount cases.

Each Case has 3 Gigabit Connections into my Gigabit Backbone. All Connections are Load Bearing.

I have 6 Xlobby PC's Reading off the Raid Arrays

[zewt]

Why would you have three Gigabit NICs in each PC?

[GFORCE]

for future upgrades.

[hvs69]

Zewt,

I like your media server solution.

A couple of questions
Which OS are you running on your server ?
Since you swap the drives, how do you deal with Xlobby database updates/refresh. Are all your movies stored on the database as offline ?

Thanks

[zewt]

I have the SATA backplanes currently installed on a box running XP pro. Although it would work fine with Win2K and linux I suspect.

My Xlobby runs on another pc, my HTPC in my living room.

The SATA Drives are labeled:
DVDs_10
DVDs_20
...
DVDs_80

and my HTPC has them mapped as drive J, K, L,... P.

If I take out DVDs_20 then those movies just disappear from the available movies in Xlobby.

I don't leave my HTPC running all the time, so obviously every time I start it up, it looks to see what mapped drives are currently available.

I do not do any listing of Offline movies, simply because I have not got around to playing with that yet.

But as I fill up these current drives I suspect I will want to. Also the task of adding everything to DVD profiler is daunting in itself.

Sorry if this does not answer your question effectively enough.

[hvs69]

Thanks zewt for the reply.

I was thinking, maybe one can store all the movies as offline items on the database. That way they will not appear/disappear based on which drive is in operation. Additionally you can also have an additional "Disk Label" field in your Movies database that contains the disk-label information. That way you don't have to maintain a separate master database of all your movies. You will know which disk to insert in your server, when you select a movie

I have not worked with the offline feature of Xlobby, so I don't know if it will work. But just a thought.

[zewt]

Yes I believe you could do that easily enough.

I am looking at my dvdprofiler to see if I can modify a field for that use.

[zewt]

I found a useful feature in DVDprofiler to keep track of where your movie is stored.

DVDProfiler allows you to manually enter a Location and Slot for any DVD in the listing. This obviously is intended for the multi-DVD players.

But for my use, "location" can be which hard drive I have stored the movie on.

To edit this information right-click on the movie listing and choose personalize.

You could also use the "notes" field for the same purpose, but "location" seems much more appropriate.

And the really good news - Those fields ARE exported in the XML format that can be used in Xlobby.