Rip to NAS or to PC first? How to multiple discs?

[Ace77]

I have zero experience with a NAS, and am still researching which to buy, but I think I've reached the point I want to rip my movie collection to a NAS. Currently have 450 UHD (and counting) and 1,000 blu ray, so I think it's time. I also have three UHD friendly drives, plus one blu ray drive, for a total of four drives I could rip with simultaneously. I also want to do 1:1 quality rips, so no reencoding needed.

First question..when ripping movies is it advisable or possible to rip directly to the NAS, or should I first rip the movie to my local pc, and then transfer from the pc to the NAS? I guess my thinking was I would connect the ripping drive to my pc, then would connect my laptop to the NAS and from within MakeMkv would direct the destination to the NAS instead of the local drive of my pc. I thought this would be the most efficient way, but I keep having people tell me they rip to a local drive first, then transfer to the NAS as a second step.

Next, I'd naturally like to take advantage of using up to all four of the disc drives to rip simultaneously to speed the process along. Is there a way or best method to achieve that? If ripping directly to the NAS is the preferred method, what determines how many movies I can rip at a time? Is it the number of high speed USB ports? Anything else? If ripping to a local drive first and transferring to the NAS is the preferred method, is there a best way to accomplish ripping up to four discs at a time? For example, instead of ripping to four separate pc hard drives, and transferring to the NAS from four separate pc's, could I buy an external hard drive and somehow rip/write to it from all four pc's simultaneously? Or am I asking for too much with this?

Thank you for any guidance anyone can provide!

[dcoke22]

MakeMKV has a preference called 'Ask for single drive mode' that when turned on, locks an instance of MakeMKV to a specific optical drive. This keeps multiple instances from interfering with each other. Personally, I rip to a local SSD, get everything how I like it, then move it off to my NAS. I do a decrypted backup first, then make .mkv files from that, so a local SSD dramatically speeds up that workflow. I have four USB connected optical drives and have used all four at the same time with each instance of MakeMKV saving to its own folder on the same SSD. I think MakeMKV's limit is 16 drives.

One doesn't have to rip to a local drive first though. If your home network is stable, you could mount a share from your NAS on your computer and read and write data to it easily enough. The share will show up just like any other drive on your computer. You could pick it as a destination in MakeMKV. Certainly, if you're ripping from an optical drive, you're unlikely to be limited by the speed of your network. And if you have at least gigabit ethernet speeds, ripping from 3 or 4 optical drives at the same time is unlikely to be limited by your network speeds. 2.5Gb ethernet is fairly common and easy to do these days.

As a rule of thumb, I figure a blu-ray is about a 30GB .mkv file. And a UHD is about a 60GB .mkv file. For you, keeping all those rips is probably around 60TB of storage plus room to grow. Most storage schemes you'll find on a NAS start to get unhappy when a volume gets more than 80% full. So, a 75TB volume that's 80% full will hold 60TB. Another rule of thumb is whatever you think you need for storage is probably wrong, so double it, which in this example means 150TB of addressable storage. 24TB disks are reasonably available these days (Don't know if that's true yet for Synology). After overhead and the difference between marketing and reality, figure there's really about 22TB on such a drive. So, you'd need at least 7 drives + redundancy. With that many drives that are that big, you'd probably want at least two disk redundancy (RAID 6 or whatever), so 9 drives.

And it is important to point out that a RAID is not a backup. While it helps insulate you from drive failures, it does not prevent fire, flood, or thieves from destroying all your data.

[Ace77]

Delete

[Ace77]

MakeMKV has a preference called 'Ask for single drive mode' that when turned on, locks an instance of MakeMKV to a specific optical drive. This keeps multiple instances from interfering with each other. Personally, I rip to a local SSD, get everything how I like it, then move it off to my NAS. I do a decrypted backup first, then make .mkv files from that, so a local SSD dramatically speeds up that workflow. I have four USB connected optical drives and have used all four at the same time with each instance of MakeMKV saving to its own folder on the same SSD. I think MakeMKV's limit is 16 drives.

One doesn't have to rip to a local drive first though. If your home network is stable, you could mount a share from your NAS on your computer and read and write data to it easily enough. The share will show up just like any other drive on your computer. You could pick it as a destination in MakeMKV. Certainly, if you're ripping from an optical drive, you're unlikely to be limited by the speed of your network. And if you have at least gigabit ethernet speeds, ripping from 3 or 4 optical drives at the same time is unlikely to be limited by your network speeds. 2.5Gb ethernet is fairly common and easy to do these days.

As a rule of thumb, I figure a blu-ray is about a 30GB .mkv file. And a UHD is about a 60GB .mkv file. For you, keeping all those rips is probably around 60TB of storage plus room to grow. Most storage schemes you'll find on a NAS start to get unhappy when a volume gets more than 80% full. So, a 75TB volume that's 80% full will hold 60TB. Another rule of thumb is whatever you think you need for storage is probably wrong, so double it, which in this example means 150TB of addressable storage. 24TB disks are reasonably available these days (Don't know if that's true yet for Synology). After overhead and the difference between marketing and reality, figure there's really about 22TB on such a drive. So, you'd need at least 7 drives + redundancy. With that many drives that are that big, you'd probably want at least two disk redundancy (RAID 6 or whatever), so 9 drives.

And it is important to point out that a RAID is not a backup. While it helps insulate you from drive failures, it does not prevent fire, flood, or thieves from destroying all your data.

Thank you for the nice response! Ripping to an external SSD and then transferring to the NAS also crossed my mind, and it sounds like that's what you're doing. One thing you mentioned I'm having a dumb moment on...you mentioned ripping from four optical drives at one time to the same SSD. Am I correct in thinking this is an external SSD drive, and if so, I think most of those only have one USB port, so how are you running four drives to it at the same time?

Also, can you tell me what you mean by doing a decrypted backup first, and then making an MKV from that? I was thinking when I rip a disc with MakeMkv that I am making a decrypted .mkv file?

And I do have six 22TB drives to get going with, forgot to mention that.

Thank you again!

[dcoke22]

All four of my optical drives are 5.25" 'internal' drives that are in powered external, USB connected enclosures like this: https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MR3UKIT/
They're all plugged in a USB hub like this: https://plugable.com/products/usb3-hub7c which is then connected to my computer. My computer sees all four optical drives as separate drives.

On separate USB-C port on my computer, I have my external SSD drive plugged in which is mounted to my computer like any external drive would be.

When I run MakeMKV on my computer, it sees all of this, so I can lock an instance to an optical drive and point them all to the same SSD.

[dcoke22]

In the normal case when one runs MakeMKV, you put a disc in, click the button, and are presented with a list of the various things on the disc. Most people unselect everything except for the biggest, longest thing, which is the movie. They uncheck the languages and subtitles they don't need and click the Make MKV button. The program reads the disc and outputs a decrypted .mkv file of the movie.

There's a different path where on the first screen of MakeMKV you click the backup button (the icon of the yellow folder with the green arrow). You pick a folder to dump everything into and check the 'decrypt' box so MakeMKV will decrypt things and then start the process. MakeMKV will dump everything on the disc into a folder on your storage. Assuming it completes successfully, it read everything. You can eject the disc and put it in storage. You can then open that backup with MakeMKV and it interprets that folder just like it interprets a disc. You end up with the list of titles that you can check or uncheck and then hit the Make MKV button and .mkv files are saved onto your storage. Since the creation of the .mkv files is happening from a folder stored on your computer, not an optical disc, it happens much faster. And, if you like to also rip and keep the 'extras' on a disc in addition to a movie, it makes it easy to figure out which title is which. See my post over in this thread: https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=37847&p=174174#p174174

Making the decrypted backup first isn't faster if all you want is the movie. But if you want to get the extras, it makes the process easier. It also makes the process of ripping a TV show easier, since there's usually several episodes on a single disc. The ability to play the source file from the blu-ray to figure out what it is without having to rip it is what makes it useful.

[Ace77]

All four of my optical drives are 5.25" 'internal' drives that are in powered external, USB connected enclosures like this: https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MR3UKIT/
They're all plugged in a USB hub like this: https://plugable.com/products/usb3-hub7c which is then connected to my computer. My computer sees all four optical drives as separate drives.

On separate USB-C port on my computer, I have my external SSD drive plugged in which is mounted to my computer like any external drive would be.

When I run MakeMKV on my computer, it sees all of this, so I can lock an instance to an optical drive and point them all to the same SSD.

Gotcha, I'm following ya there, thank you for the explanation. I think I'll follow the same approach as well.

Thank you again for chiming in with your thoughts and assistance!

[Mr. Red]

If you use hard drives in your NAS, it's not a good idea to directly rip four discs in parallel to it. The files will most likely end up very fragmented on the disc because they can't be written in one go to adjacent cells.

[smol_birb]

Also consider setting up a dedicated PC as a storage solution as an alternative to a NAS. NAS enclosures are surprisingly costly these days, unaffordably so.

[dcoke22]

Also consider setting up a dedicated PC as a storage solution as an alternative to a NAS. NAS enclosures are surprisingly costly these days, unaffordably so.

It sorta depends on how much you need to store and how much redundancy you'd like to have. Lots of people are sorta surprised that $500 will buy them a 24TB enterprise grade hard drive. Or that 20TB drives can often be had for less per TB than most other drives.

[flojo]

Also consider setting up a dedicated PC as a storage solution as an alternative to a NAS. NAS enclosures are surprisingly costly these days, unaffordably so.

3D printer is the answer. You can download CAD files and send them to places like jlc3dp.com and come out a couple hundred USD ahead.

I have two of the U-NAS 810a and I'm converting both to two 3D printed 8-disk enclosures. Each enclosure holds only a internal to external SAS HD adapter + cables and a power supply (and the disks obviously).

https://jlc3dp.com/
https://www.u-nas.com/xcart/cart.php?ta ... t_id=17640
https://www.ebay.com/itm/127012146286 (Supermicro AOM-SAS3-8I8E-LP)
https://hdplex.com/hdplex-500w-gan-aio- ... upply.html
(You can use the 250w GaN version if you're using SATA disks and not SAS).

To determine how many watts you need, you need to cover the startup consumption. In the following link for a 20TB Seagate Iron Wolf Pro, you'll see "Startup Current, Typical (12V, A)" listed as 2.0. This means 2 amps so 12 * 2 = 24 watts. Typically (but not always), the circuit will consume what is listed as "Standby Mode, Typical (W)", which is listed as 1watt. So 24 + 1 = 25 watts... you need 25 watts per drive. 8 of those is a minimum of 25 * 8 = 200 watts.
https://www.seagate.com/files/www-conte ... -en_US.pdf

The MiniSAS HD SFF-8643 (internal version) to SATA breakout cables need to be as short as possible:
https://store.supermicro.com/us_en/supe ... -0703.html

How you connect the enclosure will be up to you, but if you use the above Supermicro 8I8E adapter then 1 end will have to be MiniSAS HD SFF-8644 (external version):
https://www.ebay.com/itm/266529938386

The only rule for choosing the cables for _SATA_ drives is to keep the total distance from drive to controller less than 1 meter (for SAS disks it's much longer).

The power supply is the most chaotic choice you have. You can use cheap $30usd 500w ATX supplies or even cheaper used (and much nicer) server power supplies if you step down the 12v to 5v with buck converters. I chose the HDPlex supply because it's small and had all I need besides 2 power cable Y-splitters. My printed enclosure is a open enclosure but if you have a pretty air tight enclosure you might want to add one or two 120mm fans.

[smol_birb]

It sorta depends on how much you need to store and how much redundancy you'd like to have. Lots of people are sorta surprised that $500 will buy them a 24TB enterprise grade hard drive. Or that 20TB drives can often be had for less per TB than most other drives.

$500 isn't going to be enough for that drive in my part of the world. The best that I could find it for here, at a place that is reputable enough to actually supply it once I've paid for it, is almost $800. There are some places that I've seen that kind of drive for quite a bit less, but I'm not sure if I trust anyone who's selling something for the equivalent of $300 less than everyone else.

It's the kind of expense that I would have saved up for not that long ago, but I really can't afford that kind of thing at this point in my life.