[mythtv-users] Building a library.....chews up space!!

[James Oltman]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 10:03 AM, jedi <jedi at mishnet.org> wrote:

>    I don't view disk management as the big issue. I view the size of the
> library to be the big challenge. After awhile, it does get to be quite a
> lot of stuff to sort through. Like with recording rules, after awhile you
> want some means to automatically select stuff, almost like MythTV for your
> video collection.
>
>   I have a number of what might be called "smart playlists" to deal with
> this sort of thing. My external player has some logic to help enable this.
>
> [deletia]
>
>    If I didn't transcode, my n+1 disks would be 3*(n+1) disks or 4*(n+1)
> disks and I would either need a much more complicated disk setup or just
> "do without".
>
>    I just RIP DVDs. I don't bother archiving recordings.
>
>
It sounds like people are using RAID5 for their storage.  While it does
sound appealing to have more storage space, remember, two things:

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.

2.  RAID5 can only survive a single drive failure.

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.
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