How many gigs does everyone have for recordings?

[Diginerd]

250 GB for recording Live TV.

4.25TB and rising for video archiving..

[justme]

~300GB local to SageTV machine. Made up of 2 80GB drives striped in RAID 0 for a 160GB drive. Also a 160GB drive in that same computer. SageTV gets a full 160GB(64K cluster) partition to it's self.

I just recently added a new machine to my network as a media server. It started out with a 250GB drive but is already nearly full of MP3,Sage recording(compressed using Xvid), and ripped(Xvid again) anime. It's the anime that's really killing my free space, over 190GB and rising. I'll definitley be adding another drive soon, but I'm holding off until drives over 250GB come down in price. I got a 120GB for my Tivo for $40 after rebates. This has made it hard for me to feel like even the best prices on 250GB+ are good yet. Hopefully I'll find a good deal before I need the space. I've come to the conclusion that if your drive is full, you need another/larger one.

[spike5884]

Ok, I have to ask. Those people that are in the terabytes, what is your harddrive makeup? Number,size,type,raid...

A quick calc(not exact)

4TB = about 16 drives @ 250MB

Man that is a lot of drives.

[Diginerd]

Here's how I've put mine together:-

Sage TV Box:-

A Shuttle PC Case (looks nice next to the TV)
1 x 250 GB HD Internally
1 x 250 PVR Card
1 x USB2 PVR

100BT network cable onto the home LAN

There is a Cisco Switch & Cisco Router running the network (I'm a Network engineer by trade ;-). This combination lets me prioritise traffic around the network. For example our Vonage service has absolute priority for best call quality, then the video streams, and finally everything else.

Hooked into the network in the crawlspace under the house are two home built servers. Each lives in a case that looks like this:-

http://www.dealsonic.com/skyhawip5ura.html

This gives 10 x 5 1/4" bays per box. In each I have a removable HD caddy to minimise the fus of upgrades & repairs.

One server has 10 x 200GB Maxtor 7200RPM Drives
The other (Slightly Newer) has 5 x the same as server one, and 5 x 250GB Maxtor 7200RPM Drives.

Each server has dual 800MHz Piii CPUs and a Gig of ram (Long story why they're like that but I digress).

Each server has 2 x Promise 4 channel ultra ATA 133 cards.

The remaining two HDs in each server are linked to the onboard (and slower) ATA66 bus. I keep meaning to upgrade those, but preformance is more than good enough for streaming video.

One HD in each server has a 6gb partition for its OS.

So my total (unformatted) capacity is (15 x 200) + (5 x 250) = 4250GB. If you include the TV partition on the Sage TV unit I'm pushing 4.5TB.

The downside to this is that nothing is RAIDed. I don't need striping for speed.

To be honest though I think I'd actually like a mirror setup (another two servers, another set of HDs) rather than building a mirrored RAID and run a batch copy of additions every couple of days. That way if a folder gets deleted (Any way of turning that functionality off in sage!?) then I still have a backup which won't be deleted instantly too (Which a RAID would, they only protect against hardware failure not user error).

The way I protect my stuff right now is have the Sage TV box only mount the shares as read only, with no option ot delete.

If I loose a drive I loose what's on it, but still have the original DVDs so if it goes south I can re-rip if needs be.

In the 3 years I've been running an increasingly growing library I've yet to have a HD fail. *Tempts Fate*

I've been very impressed with Maxtor, which is why everything rides on it.

How's everyone else doing this?

[jominor]

Originally posted by Diginerd
I've been very impressed with Maxtor, which is why everything rides on it.

How's everyone else doing this?

I've got a different tale. I purchased 4 maxtors about a year ago during a sale. All of them were retail drives from CompUSA. All 4 went bad. In fact, one was bad right out the box. Some were Sage tv drives, but one was a standard desktop.

This couple with Maxtor's one year warranty assures that I won't buy Maxtor again anytime soon.

[x[corwyn]]

I have in my SageTV/MVP server box 4 drives. 1 is the 20GB OS drive, 1 is the 100GB old TV shows and MP3 drive and then 2 120GB drives for 240GBs for Sage recordings on just one Tuner. Its not enough. This weekend getting at least a 250GB drive possibly another and then running them all Raid 0 on the Promise IDE raid card I got a few weeks back. I think by Christmas I will be getting some of those 300GB drives that Maxtor just released. 16MB cache 7200RPM drives to accompany another tuner.

[Diginerd]

Maybe this should be a new thread, but I'd like to take a moment to point out the pros and cons of RAIDing.. There are many types of RAID, but I'll just stick to the basics..

RAID 0 (aka Striping)
In its most basic form odd bits are writtine to one HD, even bits to another. This produced a virtual drive that has the capacity of both drives combined in one contiguous chunk.

+Ves
Speed, Speed & Speed. By splitting the data stream accross two drives you have a significant gain in performance. For Sage I'm not convinced that this is neccesary. In my world of Non-Linear Audio & Video it's a big plus, but most modern 7200RPM PATA 133 drives are more than up to the job of handling some pretty extreme throughput.

-Ves
By having two drives act as one you DOUBLE YOUR CHANCES OF LOOSING DATA, since a failure of one HD will produce a failure of the whole RAID.

Rob Summary
Only to be used if you really need speed, or really absolutely have to have a large contiguous space, and only have two drives to play with. Once you start thinking about larger RAIDs then I'd strongly reccomend looking at the alternatives.


RAID 1 (aka Mirroring)
In it's basic form it writes the exact same bits to two HDs which protects you against a hardware failure of one of the devices.

+Ves
Halves your risk of Data Loss due to a hadware failure. Can slightly increase read performance as either HD can be used or the read

-Ves
No increase in writeperformance (infact in most cases a slight degredation), doubles your cost per GB (2 HDs needed). NO PROTECTION AGAINST OPERATOR / SAGE ERROR. Ie if you or Sage deletes a file RAID1 will not help you as it will dutifully delete it from Both HDS.

Rob Summary
How often to HDs go PHYSICALLY bad on you? Does this rate of failure justify the 2x cost?As you scale the RAID up the effeciency always stays at 50%. Expensive.


RAID 0/1 (aka RAID 10)
Uses 4 HDs, and is combination of types 0 and 1. ie, you get the speed benefits & large contiguous space of o, but the mirroring of type 1.

+Ves
You get the benefits of both type 0 and type 1. Speed and Security are great

-Ves
You have the same 2x cost per GB that you have with a RAID1. You still get no protection from user / software deletion of your files

Rob Summary
Made popular by the cheaper Promise RAID cards, offers a good balance of speed & Security. The first step into real world RAID goodness, though you still hit the 2x per GB cost

RAID3
It its basic form, it uses two drives for striping, and a third provides error correction (and recovery from a failed disk) by generating parity bits for the striped pair.

+Ves
You get the speed and goodness of striping, and some data protection from the parity disk. Only takes 3 disks to start, and gives better efficiency thatn RAID 1

-Ves
You need a good RAID card. No protection against User / Software error detetion

Rob Summary
With small arrays this provides a very nice balance between speed and safety.

RAID5
This is the big daddy of RAIDs. If you head into any corporate and take a look at how their large RAIDs are built then 9 times out of ten it will be a RAID 5. It Integrates the Parity bits ino the striped drives so every disk equally participates.

+Ves
Reliable, and resilliant. Has the best small read, large write performance of any RAID configuration.

-Ves
Small writes can be inefficent (Though wen working with digital video you're not doing too much of that). Takes a large number of HDs to get started, and needs a fancy RAID Controller to support it.

Rob Comments
If you can afford it it's the way to go for a RAID.


Now having waded through that (Or flicked to here if you know the stuff aove) here's the kicker...

RAIDs STILL NEED BACKUPS.

Yes, it's true. A RAID (with the exception of RAID 0) can survive the loss of ONE disk from the array. Once the there is a failure your arry is no longer fully redundant, and a second failure stands a very real chance of cataclysmic failure losing all the data!

Not only that all a RAID protects you against is hardware failure. If Sage decided to delete all your files they're gone, and no RAID will help you.

So where do I lead with all this?

In my case I have a pile of HDs that are all individuals. I'm thinking about RAIDing them, but at the same time I'm backing up the critical stuff to separate removable HDs which are in a different machine. This separate backup gives peace of mind against random deleting that no other method can.

Back in the day I'd have used tape for this, but unless you're spending $10s of thousands of dollars Tape is just too slow and down't have the capacity to match the low cost high capacity drives that are available now.

You pay your money and you makes your choice.

My 2c.

[schulzpm]

4x300GB Maxtor on a 3ware 7506-4

Soon to add 4 more and move to a 7506-8