@
nickr, @
ned scott, @universal,
At risk of beating a dead horse, please consider this: should I join all the volumes into two pools (one for movie, one for tv) and export said volumes as movies and tv (remember, I have THOUSANDS of titles) where to browse these volumes I would see a single folder with THOUSANDS upon THOUSANDS of entries. Try finding ANYTHING with THAT mess. If however, I label each partition such as "Movie Server #8 - Feature Films Drive #4"? Now, when I need to find a title, I just look up the Movie Information from XBMC (or c22 from movie in MYSQL), look at the PATH variable and viola, I know exactly where it is.
As far as the lack of redundancy, THAT is provided by the original DVDs and BluRay boxes packed ceiling high on a corner...Remember, 3.5 years on, no a single drive lost. At worst, I stand to lose a partition, or an average of 117 titles; which can be rebuild from the secondary copy with handbrake. In the maintime, one single SQL query removes these titles from the library. I remove the damaged drive (or simply don't export that partition) and power the server, everything is back online. On a RAID6 array, what is my average HHD loss rate per annun?
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"...With today’s high capacity disk drives, 4TB today, 6.4TB in 2014, and predicted to be 60TB within the decade , the probability of data loss using RAID6 from a non-recoverable read error during rebuild will soon be a certainty. These large capacity disk drives will proportionally increase RAID rebuild times to multiples of days. According to an Intel study (3), rebuild times between 8.3 hours and 41.5 hours have been measured for 3TB SATA drives, depending on the IO rates being attained from the drives...
...This is the reason all large-scale cloud services today, such as Amazon, Microsoft Azure and others, use either multiple distributed copies (up to 6), erasure coding, or a combination of the two for data protection and durability. Now is the time to abandon obsolete RAID based storage, and eliminate the overhead and vulnerabilities of asynchronous replicated copies...."