Virtual Video drive?

[jip]

I have 3 20 gig HD in my system. Each drive has a \videos folder.
c:\video
d:\video
f:\video

Does anyone know of a way to aggregate the three videos folders so that snapstream (or Windows) can treat it as one virtual folder?

Right now, I have f:\video as the default folder, but on a daily basis, I have to manually move the vid files around so that f:\video has enough room for the next set of scheduled recordings.

I much rather have a single virtual folder so that I don't have to worry about moving files around.

Thanks
- J

[jeffnoone]

Dynamic Disk Storage is what you want, requires Windows 2000 or XP Pro

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=314343

HAven't tried this, so can't give you direct advice, but search on this term in deja.com or google.com brings lots of material, such as:

http://www.windows-help.net/WindowsXP/howto-20.htm

Jeff

[Julia]

Another thing you can do is to set up different folders inside the Snapstream config file, then assign different programs to different folders that way you spread the usage of space.

Julia

[aurigus0]

Also notable is this warning from the MS page:

WARNING: After you convert a basic disk to a dynamic disk, local access to the dynamic disk is limited to Windows 2000 and Windows XP Professional. Additionally, after you convert a basic disk to a dynamic disk, the dynamic volumes cannot be changed back to partitions. You must first delete all dynamic volumes on the disk and then convert the dynamic disk back to a basic disk. If you want to keep your data, you must first back up the data or move it to another volume.

I would recommend just setting up the different foldes in BeyondTV to accomplish this.

[ctebo]

With 3 20G drives, you could go the multiple-beyondtv folder route, but you're going to have to do some manual management of your files to get a usable solution... Ie. Set up c:/video as your drive to record shows to. Then manually use the web-admin to move recordings to d:/video and f:/video. This will work, but can get clumsy and annoying pretty quickly.

I've been using dynamic disks for more than 2 years on my 2000 and XP machines, and have to say that it works like a charm. In your setup, you'll likely keep your c: disk as non-dynamic, and then build a 40 GB dynamic disk using your d: and f: drives. It really does work well, and provides a simple way to build volumes that span disks.

Chris

[RobertH]

dynamic storage cannot extend the system volume so you would not be able to join the free space on that drive to the other spanned volume, another note is that if ANY drive in the spanned volume dies you loose the ENTIRE VOLUME I had a 90 GIG spanned volume for storing the house's mp3's on one of my servers and one of the volumes started acting up I got all the mp3's off of all the drives but the acting up one before it died after it died windows denied access to the entire volume set

dynamic spanned storage is great if youve got a bunch of drives but I would recommend doing it with a raid controller instead of doing it with windows atleast with the raid controller you could probably get the data back off.

[Julia]

Depends on what raid level you are using. Raid 0 offers no protection and could leave you in the same situation. Though if your just using it for video storage it is most likely not a disaster if it fails.

Julia

[ctebo]

If all you're storing is video/mp3 data, then you can decide whether striping is too dangerous for you...

I've moved my video and DVD library to a win2k software based raid-5 solution providing 600GB of storage. While I wouldn't want to run a database against software raid-5, it works just fine for media that is primarily used for media playback. I have no problem concurrently playing back dvds, video and audio from the raid-5 volume to 4 pcs scattered across my 100Mb network. As well, I've tested snapstream recording to my raid-5 volume across 100Mb ethernet, and it works just fine as well.

I'd say that spending bucks on a Raid 5 controller for media storage is overkill. There are lots of cheap striping raid controllers out there, but they don't overcome the reliability issue that has been raised. Hardware raid-5 solutions cost a few more bucks (at least as much as another 200GB hard disk), and only really serve to provide better write performance as well as hot-spare service. IMO these are overkill for a media store.