Storage Solutions

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vilas01
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Feb 02, 2023 4:40 pm

Storage Solutions

Post by vilas01 »

Hey everyone, this isn't directly MakeMKV related, but this sub seems like a good place to ask: what does your storage solution look like? I'm currently ripping my Game of Thrones BD disks for Plex access, and so far the entire show is going to be close to 1TB... that's for one tv show!

Movies are fine, but tv shows are HUGE! I'm thinking about building an Ubuntu server with 8 x 16TB iron wolf drives (raid). But even 128TB of storage doesn't seem long enough for a catalogue of tv shows.

I may end up only preserving the best of the best tv shows due to storage limitation.
Woodstock
Posts: 9912
Joined: Sun Jul 24, 2011 11:21 pm

Re: Storage Solutions

Post by Woodstock »

You should consider using another program like handbrake to compress the video. A typical anime episode from a BD is 6GB or so uncompressed. After running through handbrake, 400-600 MB is more typical. Game of Thrones should drop 50-75% in size.

Your proposed 8x16TB solution could store thousands of HD-tv episodes.
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dcoke22
Posts: 2560
Joined: Wed Jul 22, 2020 11:25 pm

Re: Storage Solutions

Post by dcoke22 »

I'm running a TrueNAS server. I'm running it on fairly mundane Intel 12th gen hardware, a 12400 IIRC. I do have Chelsio dual port 10GB ethernet card in there. Mine came used from eBay for considerably less than a new one costs. I also have two SAS controller cards, each with two SAS ports on it. I use SAS->SATA breakout cables, which are relatively inexpensive and allow you to connect 4 SATA hard drives to a single SAS port. I think my SAS cards are LSI cards, again used from eBay. The boot drive is a M.2 SSD. My power supply is a fairly beefy Seasonic, just so I can get enough ports/power to run the 12 hard drives in my setup.

My 12 hard drives are setup in three groups of 4. Each set of 4 is a ZFS pool with a single drive of redundancy. Having three different pools works well for me, but a different arrangement might work better for you. Since my drives are in groups of 4, storage can be expanded by replacing 4 drives at a time. For example, recently I replaced my oldest drives, which were all 6TB drives (18TB of addressable space, notationally, in the pool) with 18TB drives. That pool now has notationally, 54TB of addressable space. Now, the oldest and smallest drives in my setup are 12TB drives. One day in the future, when I'm running low on space again (or those drives are just too old), I'll replace those drives with something larger.

I find it best to think about storage as a continuum. The unending march of progress means the hard drives of tomorrow will have more capacity than today. And hard drives wear out; you'll have to replace them eventually either because they're old (or failed) or because you're out of space.

I originally had 4 hard drives directly connected to my computer and used SoftRAID to make a 4 disk RAID 5 setup. But my storage needs grew past what 4 hard drives could reasonably provide. I didn't think going to an 8 disk setup was going to satisfy my needs for very long, so I took a little more time and hassle to get to a 12 disk setup.
left-y
Posts: 7
Joined: Sat Dec 26, 2015 7:47 am

Re: Storage Solutions

Post by left-y »

I have close to 200 TB of storage on 15 hard drives and 2 large WD NAS. Most of my external USB drives are WD (My Book Duo) and they seem to work the best for mid level drives. It was mentioned using Handbrake for blu-ray and DVD, which keeps the movies to a manageable size. Anywhere from 4GB to 25GB, presently we have around 6000 moveies ripped and just under 1000 TV shows, some with 24 seasons.

PLEX works well for my server software and we purchased the lifetime license. I estimate that somewhere near 7500-8000 movies and we will be looking for larger/more drives. A 56TB "My Cloud EX4100" currently costs $2200 CAD. A "WD 20TB My Book Duo" costs $915 CAD. Prices don't seem to be dropping fast enough.

I think my drive lettering is up around "S" now on my PC, lol. We just purchased Vikings in blu-ray and I just finished ripping season 4, it is so time consuming, MakeMKV>>Handbrake>>MetaX.

I just purchased a "Dune HD Pro Vision 4K Solo" and a couple WD 3.5" 8TB HDD for it, which will house all my 4k UHD MKV movies. Love the quality movie they produce but file size is a major consideration.

Finally I can't stress enough about backing up your drives, we/I learned the hard way when a 7TB Seagate died with no warning whatsoever and normally drives have tells that they're gonna die. 154 movies to re-rip and 54 TV Shows. I have never liked Seagate and the last one in my network is gonna be pulled and hopefully remain as unused backup.
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