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hi,
i just bought a 2tb western digital my passport ultra external because i don't have the room nor the budget for a NAS the thing is some of my 3d movies are 12gb and some are 8gb i don't plan to put music on it but i do plan to put tv shows on it how can i use the hard drive wisely i was thinking of limiting the amount of 3d movies i have
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Welcome.
I think you already know the answer: you have limited space, so you'll need to manage it carefully. That said, at an average of 10GB per film, you'll still get a nominal 200 films onto a 2TB unit.
The higher the quality, the more space. So a 1080p uncompressed film will be 20GB+, while a standard def, aggressively-compressed TV show will be a few hundred meg.
Store fewer films... re-encode them to make them smaller... delete them after watching (or figure out how to attach the original BR drive)... post-process them to strip out HD audio tracks and language tracks you don't want. There's no magic wand, I'm afraid: you get more space or you store less stuff.
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2014-04-28, 20:07
(This post was last modified: 2014-04-28, 20:17 by pr0xZen.)
2TB WD and Maxtor "essentials" drives are very often available at low prices. These are usually USB 2.0 drives, but to be fair - the drives are usually the bottleneck. They're not the quickest around by far - but they're cheap and good enough for media storage if you don't need redundancy or "fast" backups.
There really is no proper substitusion for space. More space, or fewer/smaller files.
A hard-learned tip if you use USB drives: There is always time to "remove USB safely". sitting on 2TB of corrupted data because you couldn't spare a few seconds to do it properly, is a real downer. Much can often be recovered, but its not something to gamble on.
Ps. We'd really appreaciate it if you'd use some punctuation. Its a really heavy read without it, and for non-native english speakers, you might be missing out on help because they're not able to understand your message properly.
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All depends on if you want to keep movies you probably won't watch again.... I like to purge my library every once in a while since it gets (in my opinion) cluttered if I have too many movies that I won't watch again.
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ertman
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TV Shows and movies can easily put you past 6tb let alone 2tb. It all depends on number of shows and movies, quality of source material (blu-ray uses a lot more space).
Personally I find more benefit in television shows than movies for my storage as I do not need to switch discs or remember where I last left off, and movies can be played through my bluray player.
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Well, I started with a 2TB drive, then had to add another about 6 months in. That's how I'd describe my experience.
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So it brews down to expansion or conservative usage. Either keep filesize / quality / already seen material on a moderate level within your storage limits, or expand when you need to. While having a proper NAS with xx Terabytes of storage right away is good & jolly - if your budget is limited, its not a must by far.
And if you expand on USB storage - "USB NAS controllers" like CiragoLink+ can be a pretty decent middle-way. These basicly work as a simple NAS, but with external USB drives instead of internal. They usually cannot do RAID, JBOD or similar - but have definable userlevels and shares, print server, some very basic torrent clients etc. If you do fint this a possible route, indeed do your homework first. Many of these are quite rubbish, and most do not do NTFS (This can be a problem if your clients run Windows, due to FAT file system limitations). I have the CiragoLink+ (One of the few I found with decent transfer rates and NTFS support) and a ZyXEL NAS myself. While the ZyXEL is much better NAS, its also quite a lot more expensive (Yet in its class, less expensive than most). The CiragoLink+ has served my 3x2TB USB2.0 drives and USB printer well for a year, and still do. Be noted: If more than 2 clients are streaming video off these units at a time, things usually choke up. Usually not an issue with low bitrate or well-buffered video though.
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bluray
Posting Freak
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2tb is more than enough. You just need to learn how to save only your favorite movies on the hard drive. The least favorable movies can remain in the origin disc....
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I belive a statement like "2tb is more than enough", has been thoroughly ravaged in a recent thread most here might be well familiar with. But it can do for a longer period of time, if you use and recycle space conservatively. My first 2TB lasted for probably 6 months. The most recent 4TB addition, is shrinking like a grape in the desert.
What you do with already viewed media, is a key element to conserve space. The same goes for file size. To each his/her own.
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2014-05-01, 04:29
(This post was last modified: 2014-05-01, 04:32 by pr0xZen.)
But lets say physical mediums was not the (primary) source of your material, but rather digital copies. This might make the user want to conserve a lot more movies in drive storage, than if the primary source was (bluray) discs already in posession. If this media is serious bitrate, it would still be a lot cheaper to store on drive than write to disc, plus you could always change your mind about the usage of that drive space at a later time.
Managed properly, in your media aquiration and consumation pattern, 2TB will last a long time. But what would be defined as "proper managent" is highly individual and subjective - and as illustrated in the example above, could be highly dependant on the individual users pattern of media aquiration and consumation.
I'm just saying - there are very real and legitimate middle-grounds between BluRay puristm, and torrent hoarding - and all effect both storage requirements and storage usage patterns.
But by all means - 2TB is a very decent place to start. Just keep in mind that you're likely to expand sooner or later. There are many ways to go about that - one might be a simple as another USB drive when needed, and potentially a USB hub.
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nickr
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The answer to the question "Is 2TB enough for XBMC" is probably "8G drive is enough if you use openelec" (actually the answer may be less, but I know 8G is enough because I have an 8G ssd system working fine.)
Other than that the question seems to be about as easy to answer as "how long is a piece of string?"
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