HTPC Build Part 1: The Stuff

[jinjuku]

@jin I get it now... the light bulb went on. I kept looking at this from where I'm at now, not where I will be media data-wise. I'm really nowhere near needing a RAID. I have just over 1tb or so of music... That gets backed up to an external drive that goes in the safe. On a 3TB drive, you should be able to conservatively fit about 150 or so blu-rays assuming a combination of largely un-further-compressed MKVs with all the BS stripped out of the movie (15-20 gigs on average) and some other non-critical stuff compressed down to 2-5 gigs. I'm at 40 blu-rays. I have way to go, though I will be ramping up the buying once this built.

So I now see where you guys are coming from. Assuming at some point I have 3 HD's full of movies, for the cost of an extra HD, if one goes down, it's a non-event other than buying a new replacement drive... which I'd have to do anyway.

i think I was getting confused also with NAS. A NAS is just a sharable data store on your network... which can be a RAID or not. NAS makes sense near term, RAID makes sense a bit further down the road.

Awesome that the bulb lit for ya'

NAS = a machine hosting data. It could be a little 2bay thingy, it could be a $80 Mainboard with Embedded CPU and 6 SATA ports in a large case.

RAID = how the data is stored. Either Speed but zero protection (and higher probability of losing it all) RAID 0, or any of the other RAID schemes.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

^^ What Jin said, just to Add NAS could also be 7 digits priced system with up to 192TB storage (or much MUCH more with hybrid SAN/NASs)

this is also nas
http://thesolutionsarchitect.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/photo-4.jpg

 

[AcuDefTechGuy]

I guess then I'm not sure what the advantage is of having a RAID like your setup over just having a pile of drives just setup individually.

(Sent you a PM as well)

Actually, I meant I don't use RAID.

I have 15 simple HDDs to store my files. Each HDD has a movie folder for the XBMC.

If I need redundancy, I just manually copy the file to another internal HDD or external HDD.

 

[Nemo128]

I'd personally just use FreeNAS with ZFS. Right now I use a 5 disc RAID6 array and I plan to redo that in the near future hopefully. Most of my tech plans went on hold during the building of and moving into the new house.

 

[itschris]

I'd personally just use FreeNAS with ZFS. Right now I use a 5 disc RAID6 array and I plan to redo that in the near future hopefully. Most of my tech plans went on hold during the building of and moving into the new house.

What are you going to do differently?

What is ZFS exactly?

Also BTW - I want you guys to know that I do actually try to do some of my own homework. JBOD - Just a bunch of discs That's funny. I googled that the other night because I figured I asked enough questions. I can read about what all this stuff is, but I have difficulty applying it because I just don't have the background anymore. You guys fill in all those blanks.

 

[itschris]

Also, the SSD was back in stock today so that got ordered. I paid for 2-3 day delivery, but now it looks like I may have to leave for an arbitration. Either way, everything's on the way. I'm starting to read up on putting all this crap together. It's been awhile. I know there's a ton of stuff to do in the BIOS and I have some holes on the nuts and bolts of intialy getting started. I'm going with this OpenElec business so I need to figure out if I format the hard drive first, or if Open Elec does it and all that sort of stuff.

I'm sure it'll be fun... frustrating at times but fun. I'm all fired to get this up and running.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

Chris, in layman's term ZFS is same thing as RAID. there are of-course differences but idea is same. RAID have different levels as does ZFS
ZFS for example has build-in mechanisms for read and write caching using ether/and memory and SSD drives.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

Installing OpenElec is very nicely detailed in this wiki - HOW-TO:Installing OpenELEC - OpenELEC
Get the latest intel x64 build and follow the steps for it

 

[aberkowitz]

Tom's Hardware has some good links around BIOS set up. Haven't done the googling recently, but I remember seeing half a dozen easily.