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Best Storage Option for Ripped DVD Movies?

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J-Mac:
I have a fairly large DVD collection. Well, large for me, anyway. A little over 500 titles comprised of about 1500 disks. (A lot of TV series included which contain multiple disks).

I have a number of them ripped and stored on an internal HDD (3TB SATA drive), and all are backed up presently to an external 2TB USB 3.0 drive. I'd like to get the whole collection ripped but I am debating the best way to store them. More external USB drives? A NAS? Or one of the Media Servers I see advertised? I have seen comments in the past about just setting up a separate computer for them, but I don’t think I'm quite ready for that yet.

I would appreciate advice/comments on which storage media you think is best; that is, at a reasonable cost! What's reasonable to me? Currently that equates to hundreds of dollars, not thousands. NAS looks pretty good but most seem geared toward backups and using RAID, which I don’t want to do right now if possible. Of course I may be way off with that thinking. Maybe an enclosure that holds four or so internal drives? My technical level is very high with regard to ripping the DVDs, but about the lower end of intermediate as to what storage option to use and how to properly set them up.

I appreciate any help you can offer.

Thanks!

Jim

Shades:
NAS would be advisable when you view your rips in one and the same location, like your house for example. If not, portable hard disks are the way to go.

Don't use RAID unless you have to. The gain in access speed is not that great with using standard (read cheaper) hard disks, although the RAID controller used makes a difference. You get what you pay for when buying a RAID controller (and it's better to buy two, because one will breakl sooner than you think and your data might become inaccessible if you only bought one of those controllers. My guess is that 98% of all people do not have use for RAID in their homes. 

For a NAS or enclosure you might consider SSD's instead of SATA hard disks if speed is your thing. Big files that once stored aren't moved around that much anymore by the file system, which means that there is very little writing going on which should keep the read/write wear and tear to a minimum. And access + transfer speeds will be phenomenal. Rip to a normal hard disk and copy the result to SSD would be best.

With a NAS the network between the NAS, the computer(s) and/or TV you have in your place will also be a bottleneck. Especially when there is a WiFi connection in your network somewhere.   

40hz:
Most of the serious mediageek talk seems to think a NAS server coupled with a HTPC is the best combo for large movie collections.

If the goal for the HTPC is primarily to watch or stream media, the free OpenELEC Media Center (which is basically a preconfigured XBMC distro) is the way to go. There is even a version that will run very nicely off a $35 Raspberry Pi, so the HTPC needn't cost much.

For the NAS, it's suggested you go with one of those fairly inexpensive 20-bay media server cases ($300 approx), toss in one of the best and largest power supplies you can afford along with an AMD-based mobo plus a modest CPU, and start populating the bays. You can start with a single large drive, and then add more as money becomes available or things go on sale.

The HTPC handles the heavy lifting maintaining the library list, so film titles can be added willy-nilly without problems.

As long as you're not transcoding you don't need much CPU power for any of this. And if you're not doing PC gaming, you don't really need Windows (or Intel) components either.

Figure below (if you shop around) $1K for the starter NAS with one or two drives, and as little as $50-$70 all in for the HTPC if you go with a Raspberry Pi. Figure another $400-$500 otherwise.

Your biggest worries with a big media server are heat, fan noise, and power consumption. So keep that in mind when planning a media - or really any - server.

 :Thmbsup:

Target:
seems to me you're putting the cart before horse here.

what is it you want to do?  do you simply want back up copies of the collection, or some sort of HTPC solution, or some sort of networked library, or something else altogether?

the answers to all of these questions may overlap, but the best solution really depends on your end goal (and bear in mind that it's likely to change as you find out what options area available to you 8))

FWIW I think the RasPi is a great way to approach this - add a hub and some external drives (you probably already have at least one) and you're good to go :Thmbsup:

J-Mac:
seems to me you're putting the cart before horse here.

what is it you want to do?  do you simply want back up copies of the collection, or some sort of HTPC solution, or some sort of networked library, or something else altogether?

the answers to all of these questions may overlap, but the best solution really depends on your end goal (and bear in mind that it's likely to change as you find out what options area available to you 8))

FWIW I think the RasPi is a great way to approach this - add a hub and some external drives (you probably already have at least one) and you're good to go :Thmbsup:
-Target (December 19, 2013, 04:34 PM)
--- End quote ---

Cart before the horse? I thought my post and the thread title were fairly clear: I am looking for storage options for my ripped DVDs.   :)

I figured that I would get replies that address storage options as well as streaming, etc., but my question is really about storage. HDDs or NAS. I have used external HDDs for a long time, but have never used an NAS. Most that I have looked at offer a load of features - many of which I would probably never use. But NAS might still be a better storage depot - I really don’t know at this point.

I currently can watch movies on my TV using a USB flash drive; I have also just started using the Plex channel on my Roku devices which allow streaming from a networked PC. So streaming from a media server is not needed - but if it is easy to set up it would still be worthy of consideration.

But primarily I want to get the rest of my DVDs ripped and am wondering what the best storage media is.

Thanks!

Jim

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