[Roanoke]

I'm currently dragging my ass into the 21st century by disposing all of my DVDs. I reckon I'll have around 350gig of data once it's all copied to file. What's the most reliable way to store such an amout of data, with a little room for expansion ? None of it will be critical or anything but I'd really not want to loose any of it so a back up or mirror would be very disreable.

I imagine some kind of NAS or RAID would be a good idea ? I have no idea which would be better as I have no idea what either one is. The ability for multiple laptops to talk to this box would be helpful, as would the possability of a suitably modded playstation 2 linked up to it, but not a necessity.
I'm also very cheap and would like to spend less than £100 as the whole thing would then be self financed with the sales of the DVDs.

[The E]

An NAS (For Network Accessible Storage) is an HDD with a net server attached. Some of them come in RAID configurations, using several HDDs to store data in a more secure way.

[deathfun]

Personally, I'd say keep all the DVDs, but it's probably easier to just buy yourself a 1TB or 2TB External Hard Drive for about 119$ Canadian, which is about 70 pounds

That would be more than sufficient for what you need. Not only that, but you'd also have an external hard drive to carry your movies around with you

[Nuke]

you still use dvd-rs?

i have about 400gb. i back up to a drive in an external enclosure i connect with an esata port. then its just a matter of copying files over. after that i propagate all those files over to drives in other machines until they are all synchronized. crude but effective. i considered a trayless hotswap bay, but those are somewhat expensive ($15 each), at least considering id need one for each rig i own.

[Roanoke]

An NAS (For Network Accessible Storage) is an HDD with a net server attached. Some of them come in RAID configurations, using several HDDs to store data in a more secure way.

So I guess a NAS with a pair of, I dunno, 300gig drives in RAID config. should work pretty well, though a little over my tight budget ?

[The E]

I'd say so. Although I would rather invest in an NAS box with several drive slots and a single 500GB or Terabyte drive, in order to have the option to do upgrades later on.

[Nuke]

i wouldnt get a nas unless your on a gigabit ethernet network. wireless is way too damn slow for this kinda thing.

[LordMelvin]

If you have a desktop, just throw in an extra 500 gb hdd, or a TB one, or whatever. For backup, copy it onto another disc and put it someplace safe. A fireproof safe, or a safe deposit box, or just a shelf out of the way somewhere

Also, if you're doing video dvds, Handbrake with high compression 264 settings can drop the file size to between 25% and 33% of a straight vob/mp2 dvd video file at as near to no degradation in quality as makes no difference for my purposes. I've been transferring old episodes of B5 and the like, and I'm able to drop file sizes from about 1.8-1.9 gb/ep to about 550 MB. (Handbrake encode and analysis settings all to max, or a bit beyond on the encoding ones that have minimal effect outside the recommended range because that makes cel animation go smoother, 2pass w/turbo @ 1250 kbps, takes a bit of time to do the encode, CPU dependant, I've got a two-year-old midrange AMD processor, and with my crazyhigh settings, encoding time approaches roughly 3x running time.)

Since I started the project I've moved two sizable boxes of DVDs to long-term attic storage. Everything's kept in a network shared folder which I can access from the smart tv box in the living room (which can handle the BD quality stuff I got when I ran my BSG discs through Makemkv - Don't try this at home unless you've got 750GB spare for the four seasons worth... 6.8 GB/episode adds up fast.)

As for the NAS concept, I (being that guy on the internet) recommend putting together the hardware (PSU, Mobo, CPU, RAM, enclosure, and HDDs) and rolling yourself a lightweight linux fileserver. Close control, much more potential for personalized combustibility, the ability to offload the above mentioned handbrake compression process (depending on how much horsepower you want to put into it...) and blah de blah blah that I'll be glad to go into detail about if you actually care.

And my agreement with Nuke should go without saying. Don't try to set something like this up over wifi. (Stream to your laptop, sure. I like to stream video files to my netbook while I sit in the hammock in the summer, but  that's one file at a time, as I watch it, not bulk transfers. It'll take forever to set up if you're not jacked in...)

[Roanoke]

Nah I'm not too worried about trying to speed-up the transfer process, I just need a way to store aload of data in a compact, simple and reasonably safe way that can be easily accessed by my laptop, and maybe my PS2 if/when I mod it.

I'm using DVD shrink and DVD Decrypter and then Handbrake to convert and compress already, but thanks for the tip. Making up a bunch of files and having handbrake run over night means it's a boring but not too laborous process.  TBH I'm not fussed at all about HDMI or any of that jazz. My feature length movie files are around 1 - 1.5 gig each and half hour TV shows about 2/3rds that and they're fine for me.

Presumeably a NAS, maybe even just through an old school ethernet cable, could stream individual film and game files in that size region without drama ?

[The E]

Very definitely so. Not sure about using it with a PS2 though.

[KyadCK]

350GB is a small amount of data, so I'm not sure why you wouldn't just add another HDD and dump it all there, or an external drive. I just added another drive to my server, split it up, and set it as a network drive:


Get a 1 or 2TB external drive or something, dump all the movies on it and take it around to watch movies where ever you want like said above. It's one of the easiest solutions available to you, and you can still set it up as a networked drive.

Using netuse is quite a bit cheaper then a NAS solution.

[Nuke]

get an external drive with an esata port, its ****ing fast as **** compared to a usb external drive. i prefer to just get the external drive enclosure and provide my own hard drives, over a stand alone external drive. and learn how to use robocopy from the command line, its faster than copying **** with windows explorer.

[LordMelvin]

For all intents and purposes, at any reasonable bitrate (I.E. anything this side of uncompressed 4k), any modern wired ethernet connection, and most modern wireless connections will be sufficient to stream. Assuming you've a desktop rig, just throw in an extra disc (I'm using three of these, one of 'em just for uncompressed BD rips (the BSG boxed set took about 750gb...) one for my complete dvd collection, and one for a smattering of files, plus some WIP stuff and my FLAC-ripped CD collection), leave the computer on, and share it over the local network. It's simple and easy and I don't know for sure if a modded PS2 can stream from it but it darn well should be able to, and if it can't, you need to mod it more.

[KyadCK]

get an external drive with an esata port, its ****ing fast as **** compared to a usb external drive. i prefer to just get the external drive enclosure and provide my own hard drives, over a stand alone external drive. and learn how to use robocopy from the command line, its faster than copying **** with windows explorer.

So is Teracopy, and it replaces explorer copy entirely, right-click copy/paste and everything. It can also be used form the command line. Pro version doesn't add anything useful and it isn't a trial.

[Nuke]

i dont know what they did to explorer file copy routines in vista/7. but i swear there is a function in there that is called "makeItTakeForever()". so yea, do use a 3rd party copy util.

[KyadCK]

i dont know what they did to explorer file copy routines in vista/7. but i swear there is a function in there that is called "makeItTakeForever()". so yea, do use a 3rd party copy util.

Don't forget that sometimes copy will crash (and bring explorer with it) and unlike XP, if explorer dies in 7, copy and most other explorer stuff is dead untill you reboot, even if you restart explorer.exe.

[Flaser]

i dont know what they did to explorer file copy routines in vista/7. but i swear there is a function in there that is called "makeItTakeForever()". so yea, do use a 3rd party copy util.

Oh, the wonders of Trusted Computing.™ IMHO it's pretty much a given that the only thing that could lead to this kind of behavior can only be due DRM. I wonder whether the command line tools (e.g. xcopy) are also affected.