Hard drive capacity is expanding at a much faster rate than storage needs. For the last few years, we only need to store bluray media, 4k bluray is a long way off, if ever.
If you had big storage needs for media server, 20TB+, the usual advice was to build a big server with hot swap cases like Norco etc.
But hdd prices have been falling steadily, and now with Seagate launching 8TB drives for only $260, there will be no need soon for servers with that many bays. There are other advantages to a server class build of course but all that hardware is $$$$, with noise and power and space needs as well. Now you can just buy a normal desktop or use your current pc, maybe add an external enclosure, and you can populate it with 5/6/8TB drives for lots of cheap redundant storage.
nah, there's ALWAYS a reason to have more storage.
i thought the 100gb drive we bought for the first pc my brother 'built' in 99 was going to last forever. i know better now.
i'm running about 16tb's right now, with predominantly 720p/1080p rips. if i went with full BD quality, i'd need at least 40-45tb's to maintain my collection. if i got UHD versions, over 100tb's easily!
the truth is, right now i have NO backup, because the cost of storage is still a little high for me. so the seagate 8tb drive might be a step to be being able to run some kind of raid and protect my media, maybe. but i just don't foresee a time where a single HDD is 'enough'. even if they were selling 50tb drives right now, i'd fill it up and look for more! for me the limiting factor is the price. i'm not going to spend 1000's of dollars of storage, so i restrict how much media i save and at what quality.
i actually thought this was going to be a comment about storing everything 'in the cloud' instead, to which i was going to say i don't trust my connection enough to abandon local storage yet.
nah, there's ALWAYS a reason to have more storage.
i thought the 100gb drive we bought for the first pc my brother 'built' in 99 was going to last forever. i know better now.
i'm running about 16tb's right now, with predominantly 720p/1080p rips. if i went with full BD quality, i'd need at least 40-45tb's to maintain my collection. if i got UHD versions, over 100tb's easily!
the truth is, right now i have NO backup, because the cost of storage is still a little high for me. so the seagate 8tb drive might be a step to be being able to run some kind of raid and protect my media, maybe. but i just don't foresee a time where a single HDD is 'enough'. even if they were selling 50tb drives right now, i'd fill it up and look for more! for me the limiting factor is the price. i'm not going to spend 1000's of dollars of storage, so i restrict how much media i save and at what quality.
i actually thought this was going to be a comment about storing everything 'in the cloud' instead, to which i was going to say i don't trust my connection enough to abandon local storage yet.
Not completely going away. For those who work on and do video for a living or for those who produce content and do alot of editing, the servers will still have a purpose, especially for media storage that won't be used right off and archival material.
Larger size hard drives may be coming out, but also may have more issues as well, since I don't know of controller cards (or may be some, just not aware of them) that support 8TB drives. Personally I like servers and what they can do in a networking environment...a common desktop PC doesn't do much for me anymore...you build them, put some software on and that's it.
I think the multi-TB servers will still be around to come.
Previously compressed media folks will now want to re-rip their physical media as-is to populate the new 8TB drives.
But no matter how big your media library is, it will never be bigger than Netflix, Youtube, VuDU, Amazon bla-blah combined and ready-to-use, so in that sense, IMO people will increasingly hesitate it's worth the time and effort to "build your own" and how many people in your household, how many friends you have who are coming over to re-view a (comparatively speaking) static library. The same way some people are re-thinking whether building HTPC is now efficient for the new lifestyle.
when(IF) the internet service and my network is able to support streaming, i will definitely consider it over local storage. it's just so much cheaper, and while i've been fortunate to not have a single HDD fail on me, ever, that's still a very large concern, and the idea of losing potentially 8tb's worth of media suddenly would be almost devastating.
but for right now, my ISP is very prohibitive and not at all a good fit for streaming services. so as long as i'm stuck with local storage, i will always be able to use more room. first to improve the quality of what i store, then to increase the amount of what i store, and of course to improve the security(backup) of what i store. i'm always restricted by how much storage i can afford/fit, i've never been in a situation where i couldn't fill up a HDD if i wanted to.
A decade ago, we could fit 50 hours of raw disc rips on a drive. Now we can fit 500 hours, and that ratio is just going to get bigger. Currently, if you build a 20-bay server with modern drives and manage to fill it, it's going to literally require years to consume all of that content.
If drives start dying before you get the chance to use them, it kinda makes the whole exercise moot.
A decade ago, we could fit 50 hours of raw disc rips on a drive. Now we can fit 500 hours, and that ratio is just going to get bigger. Currently, if you build a 20-bay server with modern drives and manage to fill it, it's going to literally require years to consume all of that content.
If drives start dying before you get the chance to use them, it kinda makes the whole exercise moot.
Maybe but as drive capacities rise, so do our patterns of consumption Some folks waste many hours compressing BD's down to sub DVD5 capacities to skimp on drive space, so as larger capacity drives appear those folks may actually move to 1:1 copies? Personally I just save everything and ever larger drives at reasonable costs is a great thing-until a drive dies as you state.
Anyhow - I have felt like we have been stuck at 4TB for a couple years and its about time to see 8 & 10 TB consumer drives on the forseeable horizon
They've already announced it's coming by the end of 2015. Don't see any reason why they wouldn't be able to hit that target date. They are still going to be on 50GB disks, just encoded with H.265 instead.
Hard drive capacity is expanding at a much faster rate than storage needs. For the last few years, we only need to store bluray media, 4k bluray is a long way off, if ever.
If you had big storage needs for media server, 20TB+, the usual advice was to build a big server with hot swap cases like Norco etc.
But hdd prices have been falling steadily, and now with Seagate launching 8TB drives for only $260, there will be no need soon for servers with that many bays. There are other advantages to a server class build of course but all that hardware is $$$$, with noise and power and space needs as well. Now you can just buy a normal desktop or use your current pc, maybe add an external enclosure, and you can populate it with 5/6/8TB drives for lots of cheap redundant storage.
I'm not sure about others but I need about 70TB of storage to handle my current needs (42TB) along with my ever expanding collection of TV shows and movies for the next few years. I expect to see 4K disks by the end of next year and already know what movies I'll double dip and get the 4K version. So I sure need a lot of bays and disks even at 8TB. Frankly disk capacity has not nearly begun to increase in size enough to satiate my needs - particularly when I'd rather have a bunch of 10TB SSDs than spindle drives.
With you 100% on that one. Flash should begin dominating, but it's competitive price per byte keeps us using these more hobbled together hybrid systems instead. Not just us but almost all the big data stores. Too much artificial cost going on with companies trying to make money hand over fist with the current flash size in tablets/smartphones rather than setting their sites on the data industry as a whole
My take after reading the forums for several years is there will never be enough storage for x many. They are simply hoarders and the process of collecting and storing such data is the real "thrill"
For the rest, yes, a couple of drives will more than handle virtually any real requirement.
when a single drive can hold 10,000 movies of the HIGHEST possible quality at that time, i'll definitely say 'that's enough'. I'm sure i'll say that at some point before that, but I can't say exactly where that is yet. what I can say is that where we are today, is nowhere near that. I think an 8tb drive is good for a little over 200 movies of BD quality. considering 'bd quality' is soon going to be improved on, that could easily drop to less than 100movies per drive.
Exactly! I don't want something as loud as vacuum cleaner so less drives is better but the capacity of those drives is going to need to be close to 20TB before I can get away with just 5 drives (RAID 5 - about 75TB usable).
If you had big storage needs for media server, 20TB+, the usual advice was to build a big server with hot swap cases like Norco etc.
But hdd prices have been falling steadily, and now with Seagate launching 8TB drives for only $260, there will be no need soon for servers with that many bays.
I would rather say that the days of "adding more disks to increase storage" may be coming to an end. People that need a lot of storage currently have big storage arrays, other don't. But both of them will need to increase their storage to accomodate for higher quality media.
The thing is:
1. Harddisk size seems to almost double with each iteration: 4 TB disks came out not so long ago, 8 TB are round the corner.
2. Media size seems to increase slower: a full hd blu-ray is currently the biggest medium you can rip, and they exist for much longer than 4TB harddisks. 4K is coming, but not here yet, and would just double the data (depending on encoding, but even quadrupling would not be an issue).
By the time the next high quality media comes out, hdd space on a single disk has increased further.
So my take is that most people can manage with their current storage solution, exchanging existing disks for bigger disks as the need arises.
Just my view of things...
People build media servers to store their collections of DVDs, Blu-Rays, TV shows, etc. It's much more convenient to select a video from a list on your HTPC than have to grab a disc off the shelf, "pop it into the player," and then wade through all of the garbage at the beginning of the disc just to watch a movie. Life is just so much simpler when all you have to do is click on the title and it starts playing.
Server capacities will always get bigger as your collection grows. No matter how much storage you have today, you will eventually need to add more. I recall back when I bought my first PC and upgraded it with a massive 1GB drive. I thought that I'd never be able to fill it up. Now I have a server with about 36TB of storage and it's growing all the time.
Someone summed up why I don't go with streaming services further back in the discussion. Netflix is convenient, but most of their library available for streaming is older content that I've probably already seen. Anything that's streamed has to be compressed to reduce bandwidth. I only do full Blu-Ray rips so anything that's highly compressed would be unacceptable to me. I know that a lot of the 1080p content looks fairly decent when streamed, but what about HD audio? Last I heard was that the audio generally gets reduced to 5.1 Dolby Digital at best. This is one area where I will not compromise so I tend to avoid streaming services altogether.
I am old...I started with a tape cassette drive. You could buy cassette tapes at KMart and drill the extra holes into them the computer wanted to see and save a BUNDLE! A set of 3 good quality cassette tapes at KMart cost $1, but a single computer cassette tape was $3!!
........
The real point of my post is that I, personally, don't need to store thousands of movies TODAY. I pretty much watch them once. Between DVR on cable (any provider), On-demand on cable (any provider), Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, a rare Blu rental, and an occasional trip to the theater, my movie needs are satiated in today's digital world.
....and this is a very personal use case. I know many people who watch videos the way I listen to music...over and over and over. I would want to keep the mass storage today if I fit that profile. I have just acknowledged my real needs and care quite a bit less today about "I'll store everything because I can."
I would think, even if sizes were large enough, there would still be ppl wanting to use multi-drive servers to help with performance and redundancy.
I mean, you could stuff 2 HDD's into a htpc case, and back up everything, but I have a feeling guys used to running 10bay servers are not going to transition down to that easily.
either way, when I built my new HTPC, I grabbed a case that gives me TONS of drive space, so i'll probably never have to worry about a dedicated server anyway.
I would think, even if sizes were large enough, there would still be ppl wanting to use multi-drive servers to help with performance and redundancy.
I mean, you could stuff 2 HDD's into a htpc case, and back up everything, but I have a feeling guys used to running 10bay servers are not going to transition down to that easily.
either way, when I built my new HTPC, I grabbed a case that gives me TONS of drive space, so i'll probably never have to worry about a dedicated server anyway.
My take on the whole mega server is that as most on here, we start to accumulate media. That media could be in the form of cds, dvds, blurays, vinyl, pictures, tapes, vhs or whatever, but is starts to take up space. So we end up with an option to either get rid of all the clutter of the media we have collected or hold on to it. As I tried getting rid of the media, going through the toss and save pile, you come across classics that you just can not get rid of. Pieces that bring back fond memories of a time past. Pictures, home movies, first recital recordings, etc.. that your children or grand children would like and so begins the mega server. I started my server for these purposes but have gone on to include my movie collection and tv collection. Up on my death, I hope to have accumulated over +150TB worth of media that will be pasted down to my son, he can then decided what to keep or delete. My hope is that he will not only have great movie and TV collection but also will find the day he was born, along with his sisters births and the days of his great grandparents wedding pictures, along with recordings, videos of people he may have forgot, which hopefully will bring back fond memories and say thanks Dad for saving that.
So I am collecting for the future generation and I am sticking to that story.
After your son copies all that media to a thumb drive, what happens to your mega-server?
(Seriously. Even today, 150TB of microSD cards is only five cubic centimeters)
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