HTPC - stripe or mirror?

[Fender]

I'm pretty seriously considering building an HTPC. Should I stripe the drives for performance, or mirror them so I don't lose anything? I'm guessing I really won't need striping for performance, at least for playing movies. Maybe for ripping Blu-Ray to HD? Maybe 5400 RPM to keep noise, heat and cost down and then stripe those?

Yes, I know T&T. Can we leave it here for day before moving it?

[bitWISE]

How much space and how many drives are we talking here?

I'd probably get three of these and go RAID5. That way, you get one drive worth of fault tolerance but you can easily grow the size of your partition. If you're really going crazy with a large number of drives I'd go RAID6 but I doubt any desktop mobos offer it.

Why raid edition: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=335

[Fender]

I'm probably going to start with just two 1 TB drives. It is kinda silly to buy smaller drives since the $/GB is so much lower on the 1 TB drives. The MB I'm looking at has 3 SATA ports (for 2 HD and 1 optical), and a mini-PCIe card. I'm going to put a SSD like this in it for the boot drive. I want low power and nearly silent.

If (when) I run out of space, I might buy something like this with 5 drives. I was going to start w/ that housing and 5x 500GB drives, but I really don't need to spend ~$450 for 2.5TB, when I can get 2 (not protected for) $160.
These are low power and quiet drives. Not 7200 RPM, but then I'd stripe them. There are a couple other similar ones: here and here.

My total is already over $600, not including OS and case.

[PhoeniX]

Forget the OS.. Linux and XBMC (http://xbmc.org/) should be all you need.

[shaft]

i use stripe, if you have dual tuners you could be recording two HD shows at the same time. I just have 500GB in my htpc though, strictly for TV recordings, everything else of value goes on a server which has duplication.

[shaft]

oh yeah, i use win7 media center. its great.

this site is awesome: http://www.hack7mc.com/


Dont forget to add Hulu desktop
http://www.hack7mc.com/2009/05/adding-h ... enter.html

[Foo]

Depending on the raid controller in use you may get nearly as high performance from a RAID 1 mirror as you would from a stripe, the only thing you'd be losing is the extra capacity.

Some (citation needed) RAID 1 mirrors on modern controllers can do the 'read/write alternate blocks from alternate disks' technique to get higher performance on RAID 1 just as they would on RAID 0.

[Fender]

Forget the OS.. Linux and XBMC (http://xbmc.org/) should be all you need.

I'm splitting a MS Tech Net sub w/ a buddy. All PCs are getting win7 for $120. I need MS OS to run AnyHD so I can rip my blu-ray movies. Will prob run boxee. Unless there's a good blu-ray ripper and h.264 encoder for Linux. I want to re-encode them for size.

oh yeah, i use win7 media center. its great.

this site is awesome: http://www.hack7mc.com/

thanks

[PhoeniX]

I'm fairly sure that legally technet subscriptions are only meant to be used for evaluation (not every-day use), and you can't keep using the software once they've expired.. and I'm sure splitting the subs will be against some of their terms.

In other words.. just pirate it or use Linux if you're going to do that .

[Fender]

Can you rip a blu-ray under linux?

[PhoeniX]

I don't use it so I'm not sure. Can't you just rip on your desktop then copy over the the media centre?

[Fender]

I don't have a desktop, haven't for a couple years now. I have a laptop w/ a DVD burner, but no blu-ray.

Full-version software with no time limits.
Evaluate full-version commercial software products like Windows 7 Release Candidate without time or feature limits, including these Win7.

Yeah... so "evaluate" I'll evaluate it until the next version comes out.

[Fender]

I also doubt that any encoding/playback software running Linux would use the CUDA video card fully, so that MB/CPU probably couldn't handle 1080p under Linux.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home.html

edit: looks like they do have Linux drivers, but still doubt the software will correctly offload the encode/decode operations to the GPU. More research is required...

[obsidian]

a server which has duplication.

Tell me more... what kind of backup server do you have set up? I'm looking for a decent solution myself.

[shaft]

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/produc ... fault.mspx
I have the HP one, its small and fits on a shelf up in the closet.

[obsidian]

Oh... my friend has the larger HP and the software crashed on him and hosed all his backups. Yay Microsoft.

I was hoping you geeked out and came up with some sort of Linux solution.

[shaft]

wut? i had this for around 2yrs, no problems. works great.

[AmIdYfReAk]

I've had my raid 0 crash on me a few times, causing me to loose all of my movies and music...

Then a little later on, i looked up benchmarks on the Seagate 7200.11's, and Compared them to my Raid setup, and honestly, i lost 3mbit/sec.

Check em out man, they are worth it..

i picked up my 1.5TB 7200.11 for $110 CAD.

edit: looking into it a little later, the drive is on par/faster than my Raid 0 Raptor setup....

[Grandpa Stu]

we have a setup with a server out in our garage that has buttloads of space worth of RAIDed drives. I can't recall the exact number but its several terabytes and i calculated at one time that it could hold more DVDs than we'd ever be able to rip to it.

inside the house we have the pc setup with win7 media center and solid state hard drives. makes for a fast boot time and helps to reduce heat/noise. it has enough space for everyday recordings and if there's ever anything we wanna keep we just shove it to the server.

we tried streaming video from the server over wireless N for about a month but it was too unreliable and required transfering files before viewing which was a pain and a bit slow. fishing 1gig ethernet through the house solved that problem and now HD-DVD and Bluray movies can stream just fine. Not to mention that files sized several gigs transfer in meer seconds.

[AmIdYfReAk]

i would have done the same Stu, it is an awesome setup when you can have a deadly Raid'd NAS bos to serve media-centers..

But when we are only talking about one computer, it makes that rather hard.

[PhoeniX]

Full-version software with no time limits.
Evaluate full-version commercial software products like Windows 7 Release Candidate without time or feature limits, including these Win7.

Yeah... so "evaluate" I'll evaluate it until the next version comes out.

Vista/Windows 7 OEM is cheap anyway.. probably cheaper than buying a technet subscription and will be legal and not just a waste of money .

[Foo]

I priced up a 20Tb rackmount solution last week using consumer-grade drives.

20 Terabytes for USD $4371

$2954.8 - Drives
$1375 - Drive Enclosure
$42 - Multilane RAID Card

Crazy cheap.

[AmIdYfReAk]

Foo, what hdd's? and what was the connection to the card? fiber?

[^misantropia^]

I was hoping you geeked out and came up with some sort of Linux solution.

rsnapshot. It's rsync with some sugar coating, powerful and easy to use (as far as Unix CLI tools go).

[^misantropia^]

or mirror them so I don't lose anything?

Mirroring is NEVER a substitute for making backups. I can't stress this enough. The only reason to use mirroring is to have high availability, not data security.