<div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 10:03 AM, jedi <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jedi@mishnet.org">jedi@mishnet.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im">
</div> I don't view disk management as the big issue. I view the size of the<br>
library to be the big challenge. After awhile, it does get to be quite a<br>
lot of stuff to sort through. Like with recording rules, after awhile you<br>
want some means to automatically select stuff, almost like MythTV for your<br>
video collection.<br>
<br>
I have a number of what might be called "smart playlists" to deal with<br>
this sort of thing. My external player has some logic to help enable this.<br>
<br>
[deletia]<br>
<br>
If I didn't transcode, my n+1 disks would be 3*(n+1) disks or 4*(n+1)<br>
disks and I would either need a much more complicated disk setup or just<br>
"do without".<br>
<br>
I just RIP DVDs. I don't bother archiving recordings.<br>
<div><div></div><br></div></blockquote></div><br>It sounds like people are using RAID5 for their storage. While it does sound appealing to have more storage space, remember, two things:<br><br>1. RAID is not a backup. It's not a bad idea to store this stuff on either tape (which is not feasible) or offline individual hard drives.<br>
<br>2. RAID5 can only survive a single drive failure.<br><br>The 2nd one has bitten me before. I had a RAID5 setup of 7 500GB drives. I wanted to add an 8th drive. The box was an old Athlon 2500+. The MDADM RAID was working well. However, adding that 8th drive caused the array to crash during the reshape. The reason being, there wasn't enough bandwidth on the bus to accommodate the reshape. So a single drive crashed during the rebuild. Then another drive crashed. That was it, my array was toast. Luckily, I was able to save most of my data before the reshape. I'd recommend at least a RAID6 for a library like that. And have plenty of CHEAP 2TB disks on hand to actually backup your contents. I spent a week ripping all of my DVDs to ISO and placing them on my array. While it's awesome to show off to friends, it was just a time bomb waiting to go off.<br>