Storage overkill. How many gigs you got?

[mithrilG60]

Desktop: 1TB
File Server*: 2 * 500GB drives in Raid 1 mirror
Media Server: 2 * 1.5TBd drives + 2 * 1TB drives combined via LVM to present as a single 5TB lun
---------------
total: 6TB of functional storage

I also have a pair of 500GB external drives that I use for backing up all the machines on my home network as well as the important file shares (ie. not the media server). I store one of the externals in my desk at work and rotate them every 2 weeks to maintain offsite backups in case of a disaster or total theft at my house.

Bluray rips and HD tv shows eat amazing amount of storage space even when they are compressed down as MKV's. 2TB drives are really dropping in price now so I expect I'll probably pick up 4 (8TB total) at some point this year. 2 of the those drives will replace the pair of 1 TB drives in the media server and the other 2 will simply to be added to the media server's LMV lun increasing it's size to 11TB. The pair of 1TB drives coming out of the media server will then replace the mirrored 500GB drives in the file server.

Drive space is a never ending battle made possible by the ever falling cost of storage......

Originally Posted by mithrilG60

Desktop: 1TB
File Server*: 2 * 500GB drives in Raid 1 mirror
Media Server: 2 * 1.5TBd drives + 2 * 1TB drives combined via LVM to present as a single 5TB lun
---------------
total: 6TB of functional storage

2 of the those drives will replace the pair of 1 TB drives in the media server and the other 2 will simply to be added to the media server's LMV lun increasing it's size to 11TB. The pair of 1TB drives coming out of the media server will then replace the mirrored 500GB drives in the file server.

Drive space is a never ending battle made possible by the ever falling cost of storage......

Hey Geoff,

What are you using for your media server?

Save me a trip to Google: what is LMV?

[mithrilG60]

Originally Posted by Cyclone

Hey Geoff,

What are you using for your media server?

Save me a trip to Google: what is LMV?

Hey Rudy,

My media server is actually an old HP desktop that would have been TRP'ed and thrown in the garbage put in a new case with a new power supply I added some drives, loaded Debian 5 (ie. lenny) onto it, installed nfs/samba/lvm, made a big lun, configured sharing and called it a day. I use a Popcorn Hour A-100, which is Linux or FreeBSD based, to stream the video over a wireless-N bridge to my theatre setup so I don't need anything particularly fancy in terms of server software. I've also heard that Windows Home Server (based off W2K3 Standard) works very well for aggregating drives into large storage volumes, plus it'll manage automated backups for up to 10 workstations including wake-on-lan so that might be worth looking at too.

LVM stands for Logical Volume Manager, it's basically JBOD at the software level in instead of in the BIOS or on an onboard sata raid controller. Obviously no redundancy or parity, but for saved video I don't really care..... family video is stored on the fileserver, the media server is just for TV and movies. LVM is amazingly easy to setup, I can fire you some HOWTO's if you want. I don't even bother making backups of the server's OS itself (just the NFS and Samba conf files) since it's just a vanilla install of Debian with a couple packages added. The Lenny netinst disc will even detect existing LVM instances during a fresh install and auto-mount them for you so recovery is a snap.