Best method for adding more drives

[johnmacd]

I just built my BTV server over the holiday and I love it! My main drive is 160GB and I want to add 2 more. What is the best method? I can only come up with 2 ways to do it:

1-make them all dynamically linked. But then if one dies, then everything is lost.
2-just drop the new drives in and have BTV record to folders on the new drives. But the problem with this is then BTV only picks up the amount of drive space left on the first drive to determine how many recording hours are left.

Are there any other solutions?...other than RAID?

[Cal]

I'd stay away from number 1 even though I've told people to try it in the past. I lost a drive just before I went on Chistmas Vacation and lost the data from both drives. I knew it was a risk before I did it however.

This will be a thread to watch and see what other people are doing.

[SprDtyF350]

Originally Posted by johnmacd

I just built my BTV server over the holiday and I love it! My main drive is 160GB and I want to add 2 more. What is the best method? I can only come up with 2 ways to do it:

1-make them all dynamically linked. But then if one dies, then everything is lost.
2-just drop the new drives in and have BTV record to folders on the new drives. But the problem with this is then BTV only picks up the amount of drive space left on the first drive to determine how many recording hours are left.

Are there any other solutions?...other than RAID?

#1 is not good. Had mine setup like that once and wanted to change a drive and there is no way besides starting over. And yep, you'll lose everything.

I also don't think that BTV will record TV to any folder but the default recording folder unless specifically told to when setting up your recordings. How do you efficiently decide which drive should record which shows? One drive may fill one week, and the other drive with shows that don't come on will just sit there with lots of space. I have always wanted to be able to tell BTV where it was allowed to record to, be it local drives, network, wherever, and have it treat all of it like one big drive that it managed. And only show it as one TV shows folder in the menu. Then I could have a Movies folder, and a TV folder to keep them separated. As it was last time I tried it you either had to select "all" which really showed all of everything you didn't necessarily want to see, or look through each and every folder you had setup for recordings until you found what you were looking for.

There are other programs out there that do this and I was really hoping that BTV4 would now also. Before someone says I should just use one of them if I don't like the way BTV handles things... Well, I now do...

[nanook105]

I manage mine in the following way:

I have 2 250GB drives dedicated to recording current shows. I also have a third 250GB drive that I use for "BTV Disk Management"

• Drive A is my default recording directory.
• Once Drive A gets close to filling up (I know - I have to manually monitor ) I switch the default recording directory to Drive B.
• Once Drive B gets close to filling up I move everything that is still left on Drive A to Drive C, and make Drive A my default again.
• Once A fills up I move everything on Drive B to Drive C and set Drive B as my default directory.

This works for me for a couple of reasons.

• I move any movies or shows that I am collecting for long term viewing (entire series of XXX) to other drives that are dedicated for that purpose (so I also have Drives D, E, F, etc, and other PCs with storage)
• By the time that I cycle around to using A or B a second time, we have usually watched and deleted all of the short term (watch and delete) shows recorded the first time, so the three 250GB cycles work.

I know this sounds complicated, but I only really check this on the weekends, and it really doesn't take that much of my time (lots of PC time moving the files) to manage.

[Rich A]

I just use a good dedicated raid array. My preference for best bang for the buck and reliability are the Promise raid cards. I would not recommend any "software" or OS raid setup.

Yeah, you could have a major problem if one of the drives in the array goes bonkers. If you are really paranoid about that, you could spend a lot more money, get several drives and set them up for both spanning and redundancy. Where you'll have both spanned drives and "copies" being kept for back up.

I've been running some sort of raid for about 5 or 6 years now on a large video editing PC and for the last 2 or more years with my HTPC. I take the "Alfred E. Newman" attitude.. "What? Me Worry?" .. It's only TV after all. But I've never had a failure. Just use good drives and a decent controller and like I said, instead of 4 - 250 GB drives all spanned, just span two of them and use the other 2 for redundant backup. There's RAID 0, 1, 2, etc. I only use Raid 0 (just spanned).

Okay now watch ... TOMORROW my Raid in the HT will go up in smoke. I just KNEW I shouldn't have bragged.

[karhill]

Originally Posted by johnmacd

I just built my BTV server over the holiday and I love it! My main drive is 160GB and I want to add 2 more. What is the best method? I can only come up with 2 ways to do it:

1-make them all dynamically linked. But then if one dies, then everything is lost.
2-just drop the new drives in and have BTV record to folders on the new drives. But the problem with this is then BTV only picks up the amount of drive space left on the first drive to determine how many recording hours are left.

Are there any other solutions?...other than RAID?

Separate folders on separate drives is way too much management overhead for me. I want my HTPC to be hassle-free. I'm not going to spend time monitoring separate folders, moving files around as space fills, telling BTV to record some programs here and some there, getting misleading "recording time left" reports, etc. Why too much hassle for me.

Spanned volumes are a great way to add disk and are very easy to extend. However, you have to be prepared for failure of the spanned volume, so some sort of backup is necessary (if you care about keeping your content beyond a hard disk failure).

On the other hand, some kind of backup is necessary regardless of the drive arrangement you use (simple disks or spanned volumes...they are all disks and all can fail), so this isn't really that big a drawback in my opinion. With a single simple disk or a multi-disk spanned volume, you still have to be prepared for a hard disk failure. I set up an automatic backup job that backs up my data, and then I forget about it. The backup happens automatically from then on.

A great alternative is a RAID 5 array...you have the advantage of on-the-fly data redundancy without the need for explicit backups. And you have the ability to combine multiple physical disks into one large virtual volume. Not as flexible in extension options as a spanned volume, but you have data redundancy built right in.

[bpsmicro]

I'm rather curious about what hassle-free backup mechanism you'd use for 480Gig (3*160Gig as you implied earlier).

I have use somewhat simplified version of Nanook's method, except I only have two drives, and the second is actually on a network server.
So while "recording time left" only reflects the actual HTPC drive, that's actually want I want. I can do space monitoring on my server separately.

Mind you, I don't keep nearly as much as some people. Stuff that I *really* want to keep for a long time I burn to DVD. If it ain't on DVD, it's not important enough to back up. I have an automated process back up the BTV XML files every night (also to the server).

While I could easily write an automated script to move files from the HTPC to the server, I just do it manually when the HTPC reports less than 20 hours left.

What I would recommend (though I don't do it myself yet) is to have your OS and operating files on a separate drive/partition than your recording folders. Dedicate an entire drive/partition to recordings. That way you can schedule a defrag on that drive without the hassle of dealing with it trying to defrag the OS. I've discovered that over time when you add/delete the very large files BTV would generate, fragmentation becomes a serious problem. I just went through the process after quite a few months of not doing it, and discovered several 1-hour recordings in literally more than 10,000 fragments (I kid you not), and performance was suffering.

[Rich A]

Originally Posted by bpsmicro

I'm rather curious about what hassle-free backup mechanism you'd use for 480Gig (3*160Gig as you implied earlier).

I have use somewhat simplified version of Nanook's method, except I only have two drives, and the second is actually on a network server.
So while "recording time left" only reflects the actual HTPC drive, that's actually want I want. I can do space monitoring on my server separately.

While I could easily write an automated script to move files from the HTPC to the server, I just do it manually when the HTPC reports less than 20 hours left.
.

Here's a thought. In the showsqueeze options there is one for "copy". I wonder if you could set up so the default squeeze uses "copy" instead of any compression to move those shows to another drive. You also have the option to delete the original mpg after the move. Of course that would bring up issues if you have your "default" showsqueeze settings to automatically compress everything. It would be one or the other.

I was thinking of designing a system something along those lines. Having maybe a 200 + gb drive as the "default" drive and then a large terabyte array as the final storage. I'd set up everything to be saved to the default drive and have showsqueeze set up to move everything from the default to the main storage. In the main storage they would categorized by genre etc. The original movie in the default folder would be deleted after it was copied.

When viewing under the "folder" view, I'd see the default folder .. which would always be mostly empty, and then the other folders where the moved stuff was.

The advantages of this would be that I'd always have a clean empty drive to write to. The playback drive would be different than the first "written to" drive which seems logically to me to be a better thing. Ie. I could play back HD content from the storage drive and all new recordings going on at the same time would always be on the other first drive. (thus splitting up the read and write same time I/O)

It would also automatically prevent any show from "not" being recorded due to running out of space. Here's how:

The main "default recording drive" will always be near empty so you'll always be sure to have enough space for x amount of recordings. However IF the second drive array becomes full, then the showsqueeze copy will fail. You'll get a warning message from BTV telling you the showsqueeze failed. YET .. the original will still be intact. This will allow you to then make room on the second drive. And you will have enough time to do that until your default drive fills.

I may try that in my next build. Sounds like a way to insure you ALWAYS get your recordings done, AND even when the secondary drive is filled, you still have the originals cuz the showsqueeze "copy" didn't work.

You would still have the abilty to showsqueeze shows on an individual basis although not as a default.

[karhill]

Originally Posted by bpsmicro

I'm rather curious about what hassle-free backup mechanism you'd use for 480Gig (3*160Gig as you implied earlier).

If you really want to secure all your video, I'd go with a RAID 5 array. Least amount of hassle.

However, in my case, I don't really care that much about lots of the video I have recorded. My actual details are as follows: I separate the files into two groups: "keepers" and "one-offs". I don't care that much if the one-offs are lost. BTV is set up with 2 video folders, 1 for "keepers" and 1 for "one-offs". The larger folder, the default folder, is the one-offs. BTV recordings by default go into this folder. This folder is on a spanned volume, which is constructed from 3 drives right now: a 250GB, a 160GB, and an 80GB (almost 500GB of storage). If the one-offs volume goes down, I've lost video, but it's not the end of the world.

The "keepers" folder happens to be on a different drive, a simple 120GB drive. I have an ntbackup job that runs once every two weeks that does a full backup of the keepers folder to a remote drive (a different drive on a different host). Every night I have an ntbackup job that does an incremental backup to a remote drive. The incrementals tend to be fairly small. The backups all happen automatically.

The only management job I have to attend to is moving the "good" shows to the keepers folder when I feel like it. And deleting old crud that I no longer want from the one-offs when space is tight. The fact that I have to actually do something to move a show to the "keepers" folder is a good thing...otherwise everthing would tend to be designated a "keeper."

[Rich A]

I just thought of another plus factor when using one main drive for storage and then using showsqueeze "copy" to move them to a secondary drive.

That is the first drive will always be near empty .. if you are one of those who likes to defrag, that will certainly speed up defragging of the initial recording/default drive.

[Eric3a]

I have been using solution number 1 for a while now.
One of my striped drives started acting up, but didn't completely fail.
I was able to copy all to an external usb drive, take the faulty drive out, and copy stuff back in.
It does mean you have an external drive large enough.

Although, my initial approcah has always been that I didn't much care about loosing all my BTV recordings: Easy enough to fill the disks back up.
So now I'm probably going to stripe 2x400GB drives. Won't be able to save anything if one fails. No biggie.

The advantage of one big drive is much less admin work and easier user experience.
Eric

[doubledose]

I am also wanting to make more disc space. But I have tried to make my data drives linked dynamicaly and they still show up as indivdual drives. What else does one have to do to make this work? Will it look like one big drive when it is working properly.

Wayne

[karhill]

Originally Posted by doubledose

I am also wanting to make more disc space. But I have tried to make my data drives linked dynamicaly and they still show up as indivdual drives. What else does one have to do to make this work? Will it look like one big drive when it is working properly.

Wayne

Assuming you are using Windows XP, here's a link to a Microsoft support page that discusses disk managment: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308424/

And yes, a stripped or spanned volume will look like one big drive when working.

[doubledose]

Thanks

I think I am well on my way with that info to try this
Wayne

[slamkal]

I have two identical 160GB drives and a $15 raid card. Silicon images 680 chipset.

I do raid 0 (just striping). It makes the drive look like one fat 320GB drive.

If I lose a drive (only happened once in 10 years with a Maxtor drive) I lose a few hours of TV content. I don't use Maxtor any longer.

Assume at some point it will crash and you won't feel bad if/when it happens.

SiSoft Sandra says the raid array is about 50% faster than my other drives. Plus I'm not using bandwidth on my regular onboard ATA controller which interfaces to the windows C drive and I have critical stuff (digital pictures) on a separate drive.