[mythtv-users] Slightly OT - How many People have Video libraries over 8TB?

Alexander Fisher alex at alexfisher.me.uk
Sat Jul 7 16:17:07 UTC 2012


On 6 July 2012 19:00, Another Sillyname <anothersname at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 6 July 2012 18:30, Alexander Fisher <alex at alexfisher.me.uk> wrote:
>> On 6 July 2012 18:23, Thomas Mashos <thomas at mashos.com> wrote:
>>> On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 9:42 AM, Alexander Fisher <alex at alexfisher.me.uk> wrote:
>>>> On 6 July 2012 17:19, Another Sillyname <anothersname at googlemail.com> wrote:
>>>>> and where (roughly) are you located.
>>>>>
>>>>> I've got 13TB and am in Kent, UK.
>>>>
>>>> Have you got that backed up to another 13TB stored on a different machine?
>>>> It'd be a shame if you lost it.  It must have taken you *ages* to build. [1]
>>>>
>>>> I've currently got 96 DVD feature films ripped (no recompression) to
>>>> mkv and the median filesize (quickest type of average for me to work
>>>> out) is 4.5GB.
>>>> 13GB would equate to around 3000 films!  I've got 4x2TB disks, but
>>>> only 4TB is usable.  It's currently configured as a 3 disk RAID5 with
>>>> a hot spare, but I hope to get a 5th drive soon so that I can setup a
>>>> proper backup with the hot spare being re-purposed as a disk in the
>>>> backup machine.  Only then will I feel comfortable spending the hours
>>>> required to rip all my remaining DVD collection.
>>>>
>>>> Kind Regards,
>>>> Alex
>>>>
>>>> [1] - Rereading that, it sounds like a mafia style threat.  I'm not
>>>> really planning on stealing your system. :)
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>>>
>>> There should be a distinction made between recordings storage and
>>> videos storage. I've only got 1.5TB for recordings, but a 5TB NAS for
>>> other stuff (videos, music, pictures, backups). Either way, 13TB is a
>>> lot of storage, but it's not necessarily 3000 DVD's. HD recordings
>>> take between 4-8GB per hour and my Bluray rips are about 30GB each.
>>
>> It's for that reason I've decided I can't afford to rip Blurays yet.
>> Maybe next year if hard disk prices have fully recovered...
>> I'm of the opinion that if I can afford 10TB of storage, but not 10TB
>> of backup, I can't afford 10TB of storage after all.
>> _______________________________________________
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>
> The 13TB is about 2500+ movies (assorted from dreadful DTV rips taking
> under 700mb up to Blu Ray rips Taking 2-3.5GB - I always rescale my
> Blu Rays to 720p as in all honesty I can't see a difference in a good
> 720p rip done properly and a 1080p native YMMV).  There's also 350+ TV
> series and documentaries.
>
> The TV shows are mostly SD but include HD where it was available.  I
> recently broke 20K different programs/movies in the library in total.
>
> I'm using 2TB Seagate ES drives and just about to move to 3TB drives
> (which is why the jump to 20TB).

Is this as simple as replacing one disk at a time and then doing a
mdadm --grow (+ filesystem grow) at the end?
How long will the whole process take?

> If you can't trust that a kernel/mdadm bug isn't going to kill your
> library you shouldn't even think about doing this.

Shit happens as they say.  I tried converting a RAID1 into a RAID5 the
other day and for some reason the stripe size ended up at a measly
8KB.
It would have taken a whole extra restripe operation to fix this, so I
was happier to rebuild afresh and restore from backup (which I did a
test read on first).

I've also had some odd behavior from one of my non-enterprise Seagate
drives.  It's firmware locked up the other day, the drive not coming
back without a power cycle.
I don't want to to find out the hard way what happens if it does this
again during a restripe.  Perhaps it'll be recoverable, but perhaps
not.

Are you getting the Seagate ES drives at a good price second hand or
something?  New, they're at least twice as expensive as consumer
drives.
They almost certainly behave better in RAID arrays than the cheaper
drives, but with the money saved buying cheaper disks, you could
afford a complete extra set for that backup server you're currently
living without.

Kind Regards,
Alex


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