Archive DVD's?

[mmp121]

If you are still thinking of going the DVD -> DiVX / XVID route, then I suggest you use either Gordian Knot or the newer Auto Gordian Knot

For Gordian Knot I used the following to get a feel for what the different settings mean and how to best use / understand it.

Good Luck!

[degrub]

https://www.doom9.org

[Jammrock]

Originally posted by xortam
Why RAID 5? You can always rerip if a disk fails. I plan on throwing all my removable drives (six 250 GBs so far) into a JBOD NAS box.

There are lots of options, but the most practical would be a RAID 5. Here's my reasoning:

RAID 0 (Stripped set) - If even one disk fails you lose everything. Reripping 130+ DVDs over ain't gonna be fun.

RAID 1 (mirrored volume) - Good fault tolerance, but you lose 50% of your storage capacity.

JBOD (just a bunch of disks) - Harder to build a good centralized storage system. With JBOD you can use things like extended volumes in Win2k/XP, but you're just still as vulnerable to drive failure as with a stripped set. I you don't extend/mount/strip the drives, your shared resources will be split across too many drives and drive letters, making it harder to find the stuff you need. If you throw in something with a DFS (distributed file system) then that would be okay, but you still have the fault tolerance issue. You lose less data when a drive fails, but you're still back to reripping DVDs.

RAID 5 - Best comprimise of performance, price, fault tolerance, and lose of drive space to fault tolerance. With a 4 x 400 GB RAID 5 you still have 1.2 TB of usable drive space. On top of that, when a drive fails you can simply drop in a new drive and rebuild the volume, which is much faster and less painful than reripping DVDs.

Just my opinion though. When the time comes for me to build a good NAS, I'm thinking about (money pending) building a RAID 5+spare. There's an unused spare drive sitting in the array. If one of the RAID disks fails, the array automatically starts rebuilding to the spare drive. When your RMA comes back from the manufacture, you slap that drive into the array and that becomes your spare. Of course, if you're super paranoid about loss data and have the case real estate, you go RAID 51 (mirrored RAID 5) ... but I don't see anyone but major corporations with extremely critical data needing anything like that.

Jammrock

[Wombat]

Originally posted by Jammrock
Of course, if you're super paranoid about loss data and have the case real estate, you go RAID 50 (mirrored RAID 5)

I'm pretty sure that's RAID 5+1

[Paddy]

Originally posted by Wombat
I'm pretty sure that's RAID 5+1

That would make sense

I like the idea of having RAID 5 +spare. How do you make the controller automatically use the spare incase of failure?

[Wombat]

It depends on the controller. I've heard this feature referred to as a "hot switch" or "hot rebuild."

[Jammrock]

Originally posted by Wombat
I'm pretty sure that's RAID 5+1

My bad ... you're right. I got my numbers mixed up somehow.

I like the idea of having RAID 5 +spare. How do you make the controller automatically use the spare incase of failure?

It's done in hardware, afaik. I don't beleive Windows has it in software, at least not that I've found yet. RedHat server has RAID 5+spare in it I believe. Though some solutions I'm sure require you to manually repair the volume.

Jammrock

[Paddy]

Cool!

I am making plans for my patch-room/server/data centre

[spadnos]

Originally posted by Jammrock
My bad ... you're right. I got my numbers mixed up somehow.


It's done in hardware, afaik. I don't beleive Windows has it in software, at least not that I've found yet. RedHat server has RAID 5+spare in it I believe. Though some solutions I'm sure require you to manually repair the volume.

Jammrock

"Real" RAID adapters can usually do this. In fact, the old Adaptec AAA131/133 RAID controllers (circa 1997) would automatically rebuild the array (with it still in service - the users never see the failure), and email or otherwise notify the system administrator that it's time to replace a drive.

Newer cards also do that, but you have to be careful with ATA RAID - only the higher end cards do this - the $50 (and motherboard integrated) ones are basically extra controllers and software RAID.

- Steve

[GT98]

Originally posted by agallag


If you want to save a little space, use DVDShrink to squish the ISO down to 4.7GB. You'd still have all menus and audio, but the video would be compressed a little. This is what I use to backup my DVDs to DVD-R. They still look damn good when compressed, barely noticeable unless you're really looking for the differences.

Hehehe I've run into issues playing DVD-Rs on my DVD deck...YMMV

[xortam]

Originally posted by Jammrock
...
JBOD (just a bunch of disks) - Harder to build a good centralized storage system. With JBOD you can use things like extended volumes in Win2k/XP, but you're just still as vulnerable to drive failure as with a stripped set. ...

You only lose the one disk versus the whole striped array so there's much less to restore. The problem is when you start getting up into terabytes ... it's costly and more difficult to manage those large capacities. I'd rather enlarge my JBOD capacity rather than add fault tolerance on storage of replaceable content. I think its better to JBOD your replaceable content (using backups or original media) and use some fault tolerance on your remaining important content. I'll JBOD a lot of TV captures since I can probably recapture if need be. I don't know what to expect as far as lifetime out of these swappable ATA drives since I've been spoiled by SCSI all these years (NO drive failures!!!).

AFA management ... yes, you want to create a storage cloud.

[Paddy]

Actually, the only drives that have failed on me are 8GB SCSI IBMs!