what do you think of this for storage?

[Mistergq]

This was in my email box from Buy.com.

http://www.buy.com/retail/product.as...70&dcaid=17070

Its 4 x 250 drives. There is some redundancy, so its not a true terabyte. But it hooks up to the network by eithernet. The file system is the XFS file system - linux based I believe.

I am curious what others think and if they would record straight to it or use it to archive shows, videos and other media.

[nanook105]

BTV does not support recording to network devices, but it woud seem to work well for storage. If you have room, newegg has a good deal on WD 500GB drives:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136014

I put a couple of these in a FreeNAS server - a quick TB for less than $400

[Mistergq]

Yeah. On my last move, I got rid of old systems that would have worked for a Free NAS and now I am kicking myself. If I could be guaranteed one would work off of ebay, I would do that.

[cmcquistion]

Originally Posted by nanook105

BTV does not support recording to network devices, but it woud seem to work well for storage. If you have room, newegg has a good deal on WD 500GB drives:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136014

I put a couple of these in a FreeNAS server - a quick TB for less than $400

I have four of these in my BTV server in a Spanned Array and they work great and are fairly quiet. Not as quiet as Samsung drives, but certainly quieter than any Western Digital drives I've ever had, before.

[queonda]

Look at tom's hardware for the review of the buffalo and a review of infrant ready nas. I bought a x6/nas600 and love it. + they just updated their firmware to 3.0 and love it even more!!

[Synosure]

Speed was most important to me. I spent $203 at NewEgg. I got 2 300gb SATA drives. I also got a PCI SATA card with hardware RAID. The drives are striped together into one massive 600gb drive in the BIOS. The hardware striping allows for faster writing then just having the drives by themselves.

I can still add another 2 300gb drives to the card ($89/drive) if I need more space.

[ClamsTheCat]

Originally Posted by Synosure

Speed was most important to me. I spent $203 at NewEgg. I got 2 300gb SATA drives. I also got a PCI SATA card with hardware RAID. The drives are striped together into one massive 600gb drive in the BIOS. The hardware striping allows for faster writing then just having the drives by themselves.

I can still add another 2 300gb drives to the card ($89/drive) if I need more space.

This sounds great until you have a problem. If you ever get a reboot in the middle of writing or have a power issue, boom! You will lose all 600 GB. If you are going for storage you should leave them seperate. Speed is good, but reliability is still important.

[jbartlett777]

Originally Posted by ClamsTheCat

This sounds great until you have a problem. If you ever get a reboot in the middle of writing or have a power issue, boom! You will lose all 600 GB. If you are going for storage you should leave them seperate. Speed is good, but reliability is still important.

You won't loose the entire RAID if a power outage or whatnot. You'll need to run scan disk in case of unallocated clusters. No different than without a RAID.

[rugby]

Originally Posted by jbartlett777

You won't loose the entire RAID if a power outage or whatnot. You'll need to run scan disk in case of unallocated clusters. No different than without a RAID.

It's a huge difference. If you lose either drive you lose everything.

[cmcquistion]

Originally Posted by rugby

It's a huge difference. If you lose either drive you lose everything.

This is true, but a simple Windows crash or power outage is not going to destroy the RAID array. Generally, it will take an actual drive failure to destroy the array.

[ClamsTheCat]

Originally Posted by cmcquistion

This is true, but a simple Windows crash or power outage is not going to destroy the RAID array. Generally, it will take an actual drive failure to destroy the array.

I should have been more clear. Not any old windows crash will do it, no. And not every power surge will cause it, no. The thing is that it can and has happened for the reasons just stated, and it is far more prone to issues than seperate drives.

The hardware raid cards with bios chips are certainly more stable than others though. Sometimes they can recover from issues, but in case there is a problem, RAID 5 is always the best option.

[jkirk]

Originally Posted by nanook105

BTV does not support recording to network devices, but it woud seem to work well for storage. If you have room, newegg has a good deal on WD 500GB drives:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136014

I put a couple of these in a FreeNAS server - a quick TB for less than $400

but you can showsqueeze to a network drive(though i don't know if it would be advisable tho)

[jbartlett777]

With a 4 drive raid 0-1 or 3 (or 4) drive raid 5, you can enjoy increased speeds and fault tolerance in case a drive fails.

I just installed a RAID 5 on my main PC with four 250 GB drives. With a RAID 5, you loose the capacity of one drive (so the hit is smaller with more drives) but you're still up and running if a drive fails.

Read speeds are 3x faster, write speeds 2x faster.

[cmcquistion]

Originally Posted by jbartlett777

With a 4 drive raid 0-1 or 3 (or 4) drive raid 5, you can enjoy increased speeds and fault tolerance in case a drive fails.

I just installed a RAID 5 on my main PC with four 250 GB drives. With a RAID 5, you loose the capacity of one drive (so the hit is smaller with more drives) but you're still up and running if a drive fails.

Read speeds are 3x faster, write speeds 2x faster.

I think it might be important in this thread to differentiate between faster and higher.

RAID is NOT faster in terms of data access. Your data is not accessed "faster", because this is a function of the drive seek times, which are not positively affected by going with RAID. In fact, drive seek times are usually a little bit slower on RAID volumes, because of the additional overhead.

Once you start copying files and such, you do begin to see the benefits of RAID. RAID arrays have higher sustained data transfer rates for reading and writing. Different RAID types have increases in different ways. For example, RAID 1 generally has higher read transfer rates, but not higher write transfer rates. RAID 0 and 5 generally have higher read and write transfer rates.

Here is my take on this. For the purposes on Beyond TV, the sustained data transfer rate for reading TV programs or writing TV programs is VERY, VERY LOW (in the grand scheme of things). The bandwidth of the programs (even 10 simultaneous recordings) is not going to saturate the available read and/or write speeds of even a single drive. The variable that is REALLY going to affect your performance is how quickly your data can be written or read back and how many simultaneous operations can be performed. This really depends on your disk seek time, more than sustained data transfer rate. (Other firmware-based technology can also help this like caching and command queuing.) This means seek times are more important (far more important) than sustained data transfer rates, so I really don't understand the over-hyped reputation for RAID in the HTPC world (as it relates to performance).

Unless you are copying huge files, very often, you're not going to see a performance improvement. The way that BTV works, it generally does NOT do large file copying. It does file moving (which isn't affected by transfer rate, when done on the same partition) and it creates new files (like showsqueezing), but these new files are created in an incremental way and won't be done any faster if you can write 80 MB/s, compared to 40 MB/s (typical sustained transfer rates, comparing RAID 0 to a single drive.)

I do think that RAID 1 and RAID 5 are worth the hype, if drive failure is something that keeps you up at night. For me, it's just TV. If I lose it, I won't lose any sleep over it. My important files are in a different directory and I keep those backed up to another computer, but I don't feel the need to backup my TV shows and ripped DVD collection (I can always rip those again, if I had to.)

That's my two cents...

[EDIT] Here is a link to an excellent article about RAID, from StorageReview.com.

http://www.storagereview.com/guide20...epts/perf.html

[ClamsTheCat]

I agree that RAID is over hyped for HTPCs. Other than the sustained transfer rates needed for reading and writing HD content, it is unnecessary.