First forgive me if this is the wrong area for this post, the format of all of my movies are Xvid, so I thought this would be the best place; and if it matters I own originals of all of the below mentioned movies, and shows. Currently I have approximately 1000 dvd's and TV episodes backed up on to my computer in an Xvid format. I use dvd decrypt to back them up, and autoGK to compress them to about 1 gig each; though I will re-back them up at full size eventually now that storage is so cheep. I use TVersity to share all of the media with my Xbox 360, in order to watch them on my tv. So far this has all worked out very well, but... I have two computers right now, both about 2-3 years old and what I want to do is set up some sort of media server/back up machine. This computer's tasks would be to back up my dvd collection to the desired format, store the media, and share it over my network. I am not sure the best method to take. Right now I just place the files on one of a few terabyte hard drives in one machine, but I can see this method bogging down as my library grows. My question is what is the best (or most efficient) type of machine to store massive amounts of media, and share them with the rest of the house with out becoming to bogged down. Thanks Siegeon
First make sure your hard drives are properly formatted for video files (NTFS 64kb clusters). Next put as many hard drives in your computer as needed, my mediapc has 4 hard drives (with fans blowing on each drive). Your boot drive can be formatted with the default clusters, but video files need the larger clusters especially when you will be streaming them to other computers. My server setup my current computer intel coreduo 2180 (lowend), 2gb ram,4 x hard drives, winxp pro, sagetv is the media software. This computer runs 24/7 and mostly does server/tv recording duty and feeding 4 other computers in my house through a wire LAN. My video conversion pc amd phenon Quad 9750, 2gb ram, 3x hard drives. Nothing beats a quad for converting dvd's to avi. This machine I only turn on when I need to do conversions. I store videos on this PC and also can send them to the server PC. It's best to keep a video processing machine seperate from a server . Sometimes while performing video processing the computer might crash and it'll will take the server down if they are in the same case. My server can run nonstop for months without crashing.
Basically the best idea is to have one server machine, and one conversion machine? The server machine can be of lower caliber, and is mostly just for storage and streaming. Now you said that you have four hard drives in there, is that simply due to space issues, and is there a top end for hard drive management for winxp pro. In other words can you install more then 4 hard drives, I do not think only four terabytes will be enough. The conversion machine should be of better quality, or in my case it will double as gaming machine, so for this machine is ram an issue or just the processor power?
I do a lot of tv recording on my media pc (4 x tv tuners installed to record 4 different programs at the same time). I have 4 hard drives (1x300mb 2x500mb 1x750mb) and I can add more if I want. Your only limit is case size and power supply, you can always add a PCI card with extra ide/sata connectors. Writing or reading multiple hard drives and streaming the data is very low cpu intensive, Windows XP can easily handle it. Even a single core amd 2800 semprom can power a server (which was my previous mediapc) Just remember to keep your hard drives cool. The best way is to have case fans blowing directly on them. You need to keep them under 50 celcius. I haven't lost any hard drives even though the mediapc is running 24/7 months at a time. The conversion machine is best to be seperate, because ripping dvd's and converting to xvid is very cpu labor intensive. On my Phenom quad I ran it with 1gb ram at first then upgraded to 2gb ram I couldn't tell a difference in conversion speed. A lower CPU like a dual core can also do a good job. But if you want speed the quad is best. And cpu is more important then the ram. amd 2800 single core = 4 hours to convert to avi intel coreduo e6300 = 3 hours to convert to avi phenom quad 9750 = 2 hours to convert to avi
You both rock, thank you so much for all of the specific information! Off to new egg for a few tuners/hard drives, and a few more fans.
