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I plan on building an XBMC rig in the near future and just wanted to see how people manage their media.
I was considering using an Acer Aspire revo for playback and storing my music and movies on an external hard drive, but purchasing anything over 2gb doesn't seem cost effective.
So far I've heard of people using networked drives, servers, and other options.
So in your experiences what works best for you? I'd like to be able to store a large library of HD quality movies and TV shows in particular, but I'm not sure of the best means for storage and playback. Would 2gb be enough, or are there more effective and/or efficient ways I should consider?
Mods, I'm sorry in advance if you feel this is better suited in the Hardware discussion area.
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unRAID is a good option for media if you don't mind building something yourself. Similar to RAID 5 but without the equal-sized disk requirement, and it has better recovery if 2 disks die at once (all disks other than parity are readable outside the array). Another benefit is you only ever read from the data drives - so only one data drive needs to be spun up at a time, and it's just as fast as a normal non-RAID drive in terms of read speed.
Cheers,
Jonathan
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jpc-s4
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My solution for over 6 TB of DVD and CD content was the Acer EasyStore H340 running Windows Home Server. I picked it up for $300 (included a 1 TB HD), and added three 2TB HDs.
It's been solid for the past three months; have it networked to my Zotac Ion HTPC with no issues.
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Agreed, it definitely pays to have a dedicated box if you want to use unRAID. It is possible, but fiddly, to install unRAID on an existing slackware setup though. Alternatively, it's pretty easy to get torrent/nzb or whatever running on an unRAID box, but again, it's definitely something for those who want to set it up themselves - if you want an out of the box system, then something like windows home server (which is also an unraid type system) or some other type of pre-built NAS might be more appropriate.
Cheers,
Jonathan
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$100 Atom board + old PC tower. Add disks as you go.
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I have a readynas nv+ and now a pro business that I am re-consolidating my library around.
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I would definitely recommend building your own server over buying a pre-packaged one. Anything sold as a "server" seems to carry a $300-$400 price premium, and they only come with 4 drive bays for some reason. The key thing here is to make sure you're using cool, quiet, low-powered parts, because your server won't be handling many heavy processing tasks, and you don't want to drive up your electric bill and have guests ask why your vacuum cleaner is always on in your closet.
One thing to consider is that you don't necessarily *need* all of your hard drives to appear as one physical drive, particularly if you aren't concerned with fault tolerance. My feeling is, it would be pretty easy (if a huge hassle) to replace my media if any one of my hard drives died, so I just installed Ubuntu on a cheap machine with four 1.5 TB drives, sorted out my existing movies and TV shows, and pointed my nzb/torrent scripts to the least populated drive. When that one fills up I'll move onto the next one.
XBMC makes it very easy to merge multiple sources into one TV and movie library, so there's not much reason to pool the data just for convenience. XBMC doesn't care if you tell it that movies are in the Movies1 and Movies2 network shares. But if error tolerance is worth the premium to you then there are a lot of other solutions.
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buy two 2tb hdds and put them in a JBOD-Storage-Case. Thats it.
You can simply connect them via USB. Cheap solution.