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Best Storage Option for Ripped DVD Movies?

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wraith808:
I've just started doing the same; what I ended up getting was a BYOD solution to separate the disk from the platform.

What I got was a Synology DS212J.  It also has a USB expansion for great flexibility.  Right now I have a 2TB Seagate drive internal to the device, and a 4TB external.  I've ripped a good 300 DVDs without making a dent in the space, nor having to fill up the other bay.  I still have a good 700 to go, but at least I seem to have the space issue down.  I also use it for a file server and an inhouse backup warehouse, mirrored on my s3 account- I didn't think of doing that until later, but since I'd bought a platform rather than just storage, it was an option.

I guess that's going to be what I'd suggest for you... if you're sure that you're only going to want to back up your media and never really play from the device nor use it for some other purpose, then just getting storage space is good enough and less expensive.  But if you want to leave your options open, I'd say go with a NAS.

J-Mac:
Thanks wraith!

A little confused; I thought that the Synology DS212J was a NAS. Either way, your solution sounds good. I have looked at that product on both Amazon and Newegg more than once. When you say you use a 2TB drive internal to the device and a 4TB drive external, I assume you mean that one is inside the Synology unit and the other connects to it via USB cable?

Also, you must be converting your DVD movies to AVI or MPEG formats. That DVDs I have ripped so far are in the original DVD files format and take up 6 to 7.5GB each! However that format won't play directly on my TV so I am having to convert then again anyway.

Thanks again for the info!

Jim

wraith808:
The Synology DS212J is a NAS.  When I said BYOD- I mean bring your own drives.  I didn't like BYOD solutions at first... I thought you were getting ripped off.  After all, if you can get a NAS with drives for the same cost, then which one makes more sense?  After dealing with a couple of all in one Western Digital and Seagate solutions, I realized that WD and Seagate don't really know how to make NAS software.  And if a drive is included, it is assumed the drive will be used, so usually they're locked down.

Synology's OS is top notch.  And is basically just a stripped down version of Linux embedded- and with their plugin system, people are writing plugins for all sorts of things, and you don't have to have anything loaded you don't want to.

And then I get a drive, pop it open, drop it in... and it's recognized.  And if something goes wrong with the drive, I pop it out, and put another in.  And if I don't like that drive company... that's fine too.

Right now I'm ripping to H264 in a MKV container.  Everything I have has recognized them fine, and they take up about 3-5 GB each, though some longer movies are up to 7-8GB.  On the internal, I have 257 ripped (88% full with 225GB free... but that one is a file server also).  On the external I have 79 ripped so far (I slowed down a bit - 10% full with 3.29TB free).  My two set top devices also have 1TB in them and probably 20-30 each.  I put the movies I most like to watch on one of those to reduce network traffic (my noise movies that I put on when I'm doing something else), and the other that's in the living room holds the movies and DVDs the kids and the wife most like to watch.

And it's just a one step process- throw in the DVD and use MakeMKV.

I did try transcoding from different formats before... but this is simpler.  And the difference in fidelity isn't enough that we really care.  And without a lot of network throughput and a lot of processing power, you will get skips transcoding.

TaoPhoenix:
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
-J-Mac (December 19, 2013, 12:10 AM)
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I might be out of my league here but I'll offer the viewpoint of adding an extra internal drive to your box. As mentioned elsewhere, I did a decent job with a buddy of mine all the way back in 2006 planning a "machine for the future". I have two 1 TB drives already. I don't rip DVD's so that's tremendous even today.

So what I did aka my idea/suggestion was that C Drive was for all the cruft of the OS, installing a hundred programs (and uninstalling 40 of them later, followed by defrags, yay!), misc day -into-month data, etc.

But D Drive has nothing but backups on it, and is solely the backup drive. So I'm presuming that in the event of Some Disaster, you can just pull that drive out and stick it in another machine. So anyway, I don't see why it's so important to have the drives External. I like being able to just select the drive as part of the system, and one day X years from now when C Drive finally croaks, D has got to be in better shape and can just travel somewhere. Or at least the info can be pulled from it or something.

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