Guide To Building A Media Storage Server - Page 5

Originally Posted by kapone

I believe the USAS designation means compatible with UIO slot only.

Originally Posted by odditory

PC Power & Cooling 750Watt Power Supply - $119 on newegg after rebate. That's the perfect P/S for the Norco RPC-4020. As I stated in another thread I don't care about redundant power for a server at home. If it blows up I buy another $120 P/S - big deal. The alternative is buying a much more expensive case, the Supermicro CSE-846TQ-R900B which will run you $700 more than the Norco case and be extremely noisy just to get dual-PSU's. At work, business and productivity is guaranteed a tad more with dual PSU's. At home it's a waste of money versus getting, say, a better TV or better amp/speakers with that extra money saved on not going dual PSU.


For the wifer, just keep a set-top DVD player + Sluts In The City box set on standby in case of server outage.
Ok that is what i thought. i rather not go with a more expensive case. i know my biggest spend will most likely be with a raid controller and hard drives. wifey will just have to deal with the down time. or rock the stb. I will go with the pc power and cooling or swap the 750 that is in my gaming machine and upgrade the gaming rig.

Since you're 'buying new' now with drives, you might consider going straight to 1.5Tb drives. Did you say you have 2000 DVD's to rip? I guess I'm not the only crazy one around here with a ridiculous DVD collection.
OK i didn't know that the price of the 1.5tb drives were that low i thought they would still bare the price of most new drives (upper 300 price) although i haven't looked hard into hdd prices just yet. one reason i was looking to 1tb drives were for the price drop once the 1.5tb become more readily available and the simple calculation use but if 1.5tbs are about the same as 1tbs then that is a simple choice

You're the second person today that's mentioned the need to rip over 1500 DVD's -
I have been collecting DVDs since i first got my creative dvd player with encore decoder card way back when...my first stb player was somewhere around 400 bucks or more can't remember exactly wifey had got it for me for Christmas the year it was first released

i'm starting to wonder if we need a thread on building a ripping system for thousands of DVD's. I.e. a case with ten of the fastest DVD-RW drives available, dvd decrypter, etc. I actually perfected a whole assembly line including a method of dealing with unreadable/scratched disks that I handled on a separate computer without slowing down the main two ripping systems. As I stated earlier I could do 100-120 DVD's per hour with 10 DVD-R drives ripping. I didn't rip mine all at once, but over the course of months (2 hours here, three hours there, on the weekends).

Originally Posted by odditory

You're the second person today that's mentioned the need to rip over 1500 DVD's - i'm starting to wonder if we need a thread on building a ripping system for thousands of DVD's. I.e. a case with ten of the fastest DVD-RW drives available, dvd decrypter, etc. I actually perfected a whole assembly line including a method of dealing with unreadable/scratched disks that I handled on a separate computer without slowing down the main two ripping systems. As I stated earlier I could do 100-120 DVD's per hour with 10 DVD-R drives ripping. I didn't rip mine all at once, but over the course of months (2 hours here, three hours there, on the weekends).

Originally Posted by odditory

You're the second person today that's mentioned the need to rip over 1500 DVD's - i'm starting to wonder if we need a thread on building a ripping system for thousands of DVD's. I.e. a case with ten of the fastest DVD-RW drives available, dvd decrypter, etc.

Originally Posted by ilovejedd

Question how much power does a system with 10 DVD drives require? Significantly more than a 10-HDD system?

Originally Posted by aaomember

How do you guys remotely control your server? I plan to place mine in a rack down stairs, and would like to have easy access.

Originally Posted by odditory

In Windows, Remote Desktop is your friend. Start -> Run -> mstsc /v: /console

the /console switch is relevant if you're connecting to a Windows Server 2000/2003/2008 operating system; if you're connecting to an XP or Vista machine, the /console switch will be ignored.

Originally Posted by MiBz

You may be right. I believe the supermicro card physically fits in their UIO slot.

The LSI version on the other hand is the same card/chipset but fits in a PCI express slot.
http://www.lsi.com/storage_home/prod...1er/index.html

Originally Posted by aaomember

KVM over cat-5 adapter? I have a belkin ps/2 kvm, will the adapter work?

Originally Posted by Elemental1

Hmm....always liked the Dell LSI cards.
Who said these things are less than $300?

Originally Posted by alamone

Just as a FYI, the 1.5TB detects fine in my Adaptec 51645 card, and I've successfully mounted it as a JBOD. I only bought 1 drive though, so I can't do any raid testing on it.

Originally Posted by ilovejedd

Sample unRAID builds (hard drives not included):

Originally Posted by odditory

PC Power & Cooling 750Watt Power Supply - $119 on newegg after rebate. That's the perfect P/S for the Norco RPC-4020.

Originally Posted by analogueaddict

Hello,

First off I'd like to say thanks to odditory for kicking off this guide, I think it's a great idea and will be a great source of information.

I know that odditory, amongst others, is a great fan of Norco cases, and they do offer great value. I am in the middle of building a server myself, currently experimenting with ZFS (I admin a several Solaris 10 machines in the course of my work) using OpenSolaris, booting off either HDD or flash memory.

I would seriously consider using a Norco case myself, but my problem is with actually finding a supplier of these cases in the UK. I can find several US suppliers, but the shipping charges are always crippling and leave me going back to my Antec Twelve hundred tower with 4 X 5 into 3 drive bays.

Does anyone here know of a UK or EU based supplier of Norco cases, or have contact details for Norco so I can ask them about their distribution in the UK?

Thanks and best wishes,

Dave

Originally Posted by kenshin-san

This is a GREAT resource if you are building an Unraid server and don't want to fiddle with exchanging incompatible components.

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/inde..._Compatibility

Originally Posted by kenshin-san

I can't find the darn references now, but when buying my 4020's PSU I hee-hawed between the PC P&C 750 and the Corsair 750. I found a few references to cheaper components being used in recently manufactured units for the PC P&C model now that OCZ has it's claws firmly embedded. Enough to make me go with the Corsair.

Probably just FUD.

Originally Posted by odditory

I don't want to go into too much detail since the subject of disk repair always generates a ton more off-topic questions (i'll go into it in more detail if I do a bulk DVD/BD ripping guide) but start out by going to Circuit City, or Amazon and searching for "skipdr" - which will bring up a motorized scratch repair device. There are a lot of weird disk repair gimmicks out but that device works - I have two of them next to me hooked up to A/C adapters when I am in DVD ripping "assembly line mode". If DVD Decrypter starts throwing read errors I will eject the disc, throw it into the repair device, dry it off and pop it back in to the DVD-R drive. 90% of the time it will read the sectors it couldn't read before the repair, and finish the rip. If it keeps throwing read errors, I abort the rip, throw the disc into a "problem" pile, and on another day I'll deal with just the problematic disks, ala "Do I still care about this DVD? If yes, then attempt one or two more disk repair runs. Still not reading? Use toothpaste as a last resort to buff away more of the scratch (50% of time toothpaste works as last resort). After my most recent ripping session of two full 400-disc DVD binders, I ended up with a pile of 7 unreadables that not even disk scratch repair fixed, which was an acceptable ratio. The point of separating the problem disks off to the side and away from the main dvd ripping process is to not get sidetracked on a mission of trying to get that single problem disk to read, since that distracts from babysitting the other 9 drives that are ripping. 10 drives worth of "insert disk, specify output folder, click start, auto-eject on completion" activity really requires undivided attention. So, just some advice for now. More details and tips (like optimal dvd decrypter settings) in another thread perhaps.

Originally Posted by analogueaddict


I would seriously consider using a Norco case myself, but my problem is with actually finding a supplier of these cases in the UK. I can find several US suppliers, but the shipping charges are always crippling and leave me going back to my Antec Twelve hundred tower with 4 X 5 into 3 drive bays.