Topic: massive storage options

[silentmark]

For disc storage I am using these: http://www.meritline.com/cd-dvd-510-holder-wallet-holders-wallets-ehj510.html

ooooohhhhhh, i REALLY like that. 
While I do store all my new masters and downloads on HDDs I still back up all my new masters on CD/DVD and have a lot of old DAT > SHN/FLAC conversions that have not yet been copied to HDD.

Yeah I find they work real well for my archive discs. With the numbered sleeves you don't have to worry about what order things are in (band name, dates etc ...), just as long as your reference file is documented accordingly. Nice solid construction, although I have broken a few of the plastic little hangers that the sleeves come with, no biggie, easily replaced or fixed. They make even larger ones then the 500 size ...

[imgoinmad]

Fry's has a 500gb SATA drive for $139 right now with free shipping (ends today)
http://tinyurl.com/2adbgk

I'm not to into the raid setup for all my music, although if you're going to keep them on all the time you'll need the redundancy. I've currently got about 47 hard drives...what I do is attach and external drive until it's full and then document the contents, unplug it an put it on the shelf. If I need to retreive a show, I look it up in the index to see which drive it's on and pull it off the shelf. I buy the same enclosures so I can use the same power supply for each. If the drive is on the shelf the chance of failure is relatively small, since the drive doesn't ever got hot enough to cause damage to the bearings...makes for a great archival system. Of course not everything is online all at once, but I'd rather do it this way than risk drive failure and data loss...not to mention it saves power and reduces heat in the room.

[cleantone]

Touvaly is a great FREE Mac software that makes a pseudo copy of an drive and it's contents. Basically you can do this with your external drive and have faux copy that shows ALL of the contents but doesn't actually have the contents to the file/image is really small, maybe a MB or less I forget. Anyway it is pretty handy for people on a Mac with multiple external drives and such.

EDIT:

looks like it is not free anymore. probably not worth $25.

[Simp-Dawg]

bump...

ok so i decided to follow skalinder's advice and go for reasonable redundancy.

my question now is, what's the optimal storage configuration for high-speed transfer, network accessibility, and media streaming?

i'm looking at a couple of these right now, but i'm not sure if i want them attached to my main pc, or to a nas device, or to an older, dedicated pc that i can set up only to be a file server essentially.  if i went the latter route, what's the best way to set that up?

i've got a 550mhz amd machine sitting around, and a 333mhz amd aptiva too.  they're both in working condition, but will they be fast enough to serve up data quickly? 

[pigiron]

bump...
[snip]
my question now is, what's the optimal storage configuration for high-speed transfer, network accessibility, and media streaming?
[snip]

I can't answer the question, but you previously mentioned wireless and I've found that 24/96 saturates my encrypted 802.11g causing dropouts while playing... (but that was wireless box to wireless box)... but perhaps you have different criteria in the streaming department???

[Simp-Dawg]

bump...
[snip]
my question now is, what's the optimal storage configuration for high-speed transfer, network accessibility, and media streaming?
[snip]

I can't answer the question, but you previously mentioned wireless and I've found that 24/96 saturates my encrypted 802.11g causing dropouts while playing... (but that was wireless box to wireless box)... but perhaps you have different criteria in the streaming department???

i do want to stream up to 24/96 actually

[bobbygeeWOW]

Hey man, with hardware nowadays I wouldn't worry about disk access speed or any performance metric, they're all more than enough to stream audio/video to multiple destinations.

FWIW, I have a simple system that uses a "silent" case that holds 8 drives, and some 4 port PCI SATA adaptors; Promise Technology, Inc. PDC20718 (SATA 300 TX4)

I happen to be comfortable with linux, but the same can be done with any OS these days.

A cron job mounts the redundant disk, rsync's one disk to another, then unmounts the backup disk in the middle of the night. I generally run this script manually immediately after copying a buncha shows onto the server just for paranoia.

When the pair is full I remove one disk for offline storage and insert another pair. I size the disks according to the best dollar to gig ratio of Seagates at the time.

The box has an audiophile 2496 card for stereo playing (ALSA driver) and uses windows network file sharing (via samba) to stream tunes elsewhere.

The organization part is 100% done in player software (mpd, amarok) via tags on the flac files and there's some minor directory stucture for file level organization.
Tagging flacs/converting shns is done with a modified etree script, flacify.

Its a simple system that's easily recoverable from most failure conditions, with no RAID horror possible.
The evolution of listening habits with instant, searchable, randomizable, categorized, sliced and diced access to all music is fantastic. There is no going back 

[bobbygeeWOW]

Oh, and adding replay-gain to the flacs is key for random playback 

[thegreatgumbino]

Interesting discussions.  I'm jumping in just to track the thread.

[Simp-Dawg]

ok...what about HDD brands?  i've heard mixed reviews on the WD MyBook's, but there are sme good deals on them.  are they a safe bet?  if not, what do you recommend?

[Brian Skalinder]

I've been happy with WDs, too.  I don't buy bottom-of-the-barrel cheapest drives from any brand, though - IME they typically tank fairly quickly.  I typically look for drives targeted more towards a business environment.  A rough way to identify these HDs is that they offer a 5yr warranty instead of 3yr or 1yr.

[tfs8271]

Just went 24/96 with my newly purchased slightly used R4. Four channels running sure takes a lot of memory.

Just joining in to see what others are considering. I still have about 300GB available but it won't take long to fill it.

[OFOTD]

I wanted to share a little of what I am running right now.

Currently I have a dedicated home server set up.  I download alot of classic tv shows and video.  My music collection is greater than I could ever keep up with as well.  What I have done is built a server that is just stuffed with hard drives (11 x 500GB internal) and (8 x 300GB external)  I keep all of my videos, mp3's, photos, important documents as well as as much music as I can fit. 

For an OS I am running a beta of Windows Home Server.  Its a new product MS is developing for just this type of application.  It allows me to add or remove drives as I see fit and also allows me to choose the type of redundancy that I want on a file by file or folder by folder basis.  For example I have all my photos and documents backed up.

If you have a little bit of time look into WHS.     http://blogs.technet.com/homeserver/default.aspx

As for hard drives I stick to only Maxtor and WD nowadays.  Never go below their mid-level line of drives. 

24/96 won't work wirelessly.  To much info and you get lots of dropped data.  802.11 N  maybe but that hear is still a little way off for affordable public consumption.

[pigiron]

Hey man, with hardware nowadays I wouldn't worry about disk access speed or any performance metric, they're all more than enough to stream audio/video to multiple destinations.

FWIW, I have a simple system that uses a "silent" case that holds 8 drives, and some 4 port PCI SATA adaptors; Promise Technology, Inc. PDC20718 (SATA 300 TX4)

I happen to be comfortable with linux, but the same can be done with any OS these days.

A cron job mounts the redundant disk, rsync's one disk to another, then unmounts the backup disk in the middle of the night. I generally run this script manually immediately after copying a buncha shows onto the server just for paranoia.

When the pair is full I remove one disk for offline storage and insert another pair. I size the disks according to the best dollar to gig ratio of Seagates at the time.

The box has an audiophile 2496 card for stereo playing (ALSA driver) and uses windows network file sharing (via samba) to stream tunes elsewhere.

The organization part is 100% done in player software (mpd, amarok) via tags on the flac files and there's some minor directory stucture for file level organization.
Tagging flacs/converting shns is done with a modified etree script, flacify.

Its a simple system that's easily recoverable from most failure conditions, with no RAID horror possible.
The evolution of listening habits with instant, searchable, randomizable, categorized, sliced and diced access to all music is fantastic. There is no going back 

wow!  almost a deja vu!

ALSA, check... audiophile 2496, check... "silent case", check... linux, double check 

lirc for handheld remote control... lcdproc for LCD display... moc for remote control from any of the other systems

but back on topic... removable RAID 1 via sata 3ware controller with WD RE2 drives (but i really like your rsync idea!)... sticking with "high end" WD because I've not (yet) had one problem in these many years... and this system runs 24/7 for months while the other boxes are up and down a lot.

hooking this up directly in the stereo chain prevented any (of my) network worries, as the box's only connection is wireless (no keyboard, mouse, or display) and I'd just entered the world of 24/96... well that, and I'm jam'n to a just finished torrent on the good sound system while still uploading

[bobbygeeWOW]

Right on, +T on the *nix chops 

I notice people digging the WD drives on this thread. I had some particularly painful WD's fail on me a few years back, so even though I consider HD failures inevitable I decided to blow them off for life 

I knew Seagate from their highend SCSI drives at the time (cheetah's?) and they were branching into the consumer market with ATA controllers. So even though I consider choosing a HD basically a crapshoot because they all fail, you gotta use some criteria, so that became the next choice. I'm not really involved in that stuff any more but we used to use diverse brands of drives in our arrays so when a batch went bad there were enough other batches still running..

Fortunately (coincidentally) I have not experienced a single failure since.  <knocks on wood.> Whatever works for ya.. if yer backups are solid a drive failure is a time suck, nothing else.