Best way to organize my tv and movie collection (Hard Drives and backups)

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hagrid

72 posts

Master Geek
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#143189 6-Apr-2014 00:43

Hi,

I currently have a 3 TB internal hard drive, I have about 1.36TB of tv series on it,
142GB of movies, and games, I also have a 2TB external desktop drive that I don't really use, and I have a 3TB external drive that has the exact same tv.movies, games as the internal drive, but I am running out of storage on my 3TB internal drive I have just under 1TB left, but I also like to have 2 copy's of my tv/movie stuff in case one hdd breaks I don't loose everything, what should I do, open up the western digital case and seagate case and install them inside my computer and maybe split the drives into category's like 1 drive could have titles ranging from A to P and another drive titles P to Z?? I don't need these drives to be portable and I know opening them voids the warranty's, but I need more space and I can't afford to mirror all this data... Will the drives last longer inside my PC rather then in the enclosures bearing in mind when my computer is on they will be on also

Thanks

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Mad Scientist
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#1019275 6-Apr-2014 00:51

easiest to have them all (both backups) in your PC i think. as long as you have 2 copies should be fine. I hate wires/plugging things in.

you can't drop a PC like you can drop a portable something (eg if someone trips on a cable)

hagrid

72 posts

Master Geek
Inactive user

#1019276 6-Apr-2014 00:54

I guess I'll crack open the enclosures, it will be more easy then having to turn the drive on all the time to copy new stuff over, maybe they will last longer inside my PC also, Now I have the job of opening them, they make them very hard to get opened!

andrewNZ

2487 posts

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#1019295 6-Apr-2014 07:40

You could look at Stablebit DrivePool and Scanner. I use it, and it's awesome. There's a 30 day trial too.

DrivePool pools your disks and presents one large virtual disk. Pool disks can be any size and don't have to be the same. It even allows duplication of the folders you chose.
Scanner monitors disks and gives DrivePool the ability to avoid using hot disks and evacuate disks detected to be failing.

hagrid

72 posts

Master Geek
Inactive user

#1019360 6-Apr-2014 09:21

andrewNZ: You could look at Stablebit DrivePool and Scanner. I use it, and it's awesome. There's a 30 day trial too.

DrivePool pools your disks and presents one large virtual disk. Pool disks can be any size and don't have to be the same. It even allows duplication of the folders you chose.
Scanner monitors disks and gives DrivePool the ability to avoid using hot disks and evacuate disks detected to be failing.

Does it still show the individual drives in My Computer I assume it does.

hagrid

72 posts

Master Geek
Inactive user

#1019370 6-Apr-2014 09:47

what about only keeping 2 copys of the tv and movies I really like to save space? or keep a record of what is on what drive and if one drive fails I'll know what I need to re-download?

dandamann

8 posts

Wannabe Geek

#1019374 6-Apr-2014 10:10

Bear in mind that having the drives attached internally may cause them to 'spin-up' more often while your machine is on, rather than just when they are attached via USB. This may end up decreasing the lifespan of your drive if your computer is on for long periods of time. Although i wouldn't really be too worried about this as hard drives don't really last very long anyway.

Much more importantly, many external drive manufacturers these days are getting weary of people doing just this and stripping the drives out of their external enclosures, seeing as these are a far cheaper than the genuine internal drives, so they are in the habit of soldering the drives to the USB connector board. This will stop you from installing it in your computer.

One last interesting point, if your drive is a 2.5" drive, you may want to make sure your internal hard drive bays have the ability to mount the smaller drives. Most do, however, you wouldn't want to rip them out to find you cant secure them properly, which seriously increases the noise they make.

In terms of keeping a backup, i would suggest looking into setting up a RAID 1 array with the two 3TB drives, this essentially handles the backup for you by mirroring the content across both drives, assuming of course your motherboard supports raid.

If, however, you are more interested in having more space and would rather have more space than keep a backup, wipe one of the drives and delete the partition using windows disk management (assuming you are using windows), then extend the partition on other drive (right click in disk management) and select the now empty drive to expand it onto. this will create a 'spanned' partition, and will appear in windows as a single 6GB drive allowing you to store the data as you wish, whilst making the most of your space.

There are a few things to note about the above suggestion:
- if one drive fails, both drives will become inoperable and you will lose the data and need to start again.
- if one of the drives is used to also store your os, you will no longer be able to boot into that os.

For a few 100$ you can have the best of both worlds, i would honestly suggest buying a cheap 3TB internal (or two) from somewhere like playtech (i just purchased one for $160), then set up a RAID 5 array which offers both redundancy and speed, as well as allowing you to use 6TB of space (assuming you have 3x 3TB Drives)

JimmyH

2886 posts

Uber Geek

#1019379 6-Apr-2014 10:28

Consider a NAS. They are fairly cheap now. Configure as RAID1 or RAID5 for some fault tolerance if a drive fails. If you are really worried about losing material, get a USB drive or two (which are also fairly cheap per TB now) and also store a duplicate copy in a cupboard somewhere as a backup.

NAS advantages - fault tolerance, more space presented as a single volume, available to any machine on the network. Plus, you can then get media players or a smart TV etc later if you want, and stream to your TV instead of watching films on a computer monitor. Disadvantages - some cost (cheap two-Bay are around $2-250, four-bay around $5-700, plus drives). For drives, depending on configuration and the ones you own, you may be able to use the ones you already have.

GoodSync

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NonprayingMantis

6434 posts

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#1019397 6-Apr-2014 10:41

have you considered that in the world of high/no limit data caps, vdsl/ufb speeds, and services like Netflix and bittorrent, there is not really much need anymore to store TBs of TV/movie data anymore, since you can instantly stream, or download in minutes, whatever content you want whenever you want it.

Sideface

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#1019418 6-Apr-2014 11:20

NonprayingMantis: have you considered that in the world of high/no limit data caps, vdsl/ufb speeds, and services like Netflix and bittorrent, there is not really much need anymore to store TBs of TV/movie data anymore, since you can instantly stream, or download in minutes, whatever content you want whenever you want it.

Most of us don't live in this Utopian world.
So for the time being we need local storage that we have control over.
I vote for NAS.

Sideface

hagrid

72 posts

Master Geek
Inactive user

#1019421 6-Apr-2014 11:30

dandamann: Bear in mind that having the drives attached internally may cause them to 'spin-up' more often while your machine is on, rather than just when they are attached via USB. This may end up decreasing the lifespan of your drive if your computer is on for long periods of time. Although i wouldn't really be too worried about this as hard drives don't really last very long anyway.

Much more importantly, many external drive manufacturers these days are getting weary of people doing just this and stripping the drives out of their external enclosures, seeing as these are a far cheaper than the genuine internal drives, so they are in the habit of soldering the drives to the USB connector board. This will stop you from installing it in your computer.

One last interesting point, if your drive is a 2.5" drive, you may want to make sure your internal hard drive bays have the ability to mount the smaller drives. Most do, however, you wouldn't want to rip them out to find you cant secure them properly, which seriously increases the noise they make.

In terms of keeping a backup, i would suggest looking into setting up a RAID 1 array with the two 3TB drives, this essentially handles the backup for you by mirroring the content across both drives, assuming of course your motherboard supports raid.

If, however, you are more interested in having more space and would rather have more space than keep a backup, wipe one of the drives and delete the partition using windows disk management (assuming you are using windows), then extend the partition on other drive (right click in disk management) and select the now empty drive to expand it onto. this will create a 'spanned' partition, and will appear in windows as a single 6GB drive allowing you to store the data as you wish, whilst making the most of your space.

There are a few things to note about the above suggestion:
- if one drive fails, both drives will become inoperable and you will lose the data and need to start again.
- if one of the drives is used to also store your os, you will no longer be able to boot into that os.

For a few 100$ you can have the best of both worlds, i would honestly suggest buying a cheap 3TB internal (or two) from somewhere like playtech (i just purchased one for $160), then set up a RAID 5 array which offers both redundancy and speed, as well as allowing you to use 6TB of space (assuming you have 3x 3TB Drives)

I have a SSD my OS is on.
My case supports both 2''5 and 3''5 drives, and I have the mounts and bays for 7 drives,
Of course I checked my model of external hard drive and watched a youtube video on opening it so that I could be sure that it's just a normal desktop drive,
I have already removed the seagate drive last night and installed it.
My MB supports raid but I don't want to go down that road.
Are you saying if I merge 2 separate drives they will appear as a single 6TB drive but if one drive fails I wont be able to assess the data on the other drive as it's essentially 1 drive?
I'm running win 7 btw, I don't really need all this data I most likely will never get around to watching....

hagrid

72 posts

Master Geek
Inactive user

#1019426 6-Apr-2014 11:58

also hard drives can last many years, it;s just the luck of the draw, even OS drives, I guess as these are not OS drives they don't get used as much so they could last quite a while, my pc case is quite well cooled also, I have a coolermaster haf 912.

dandamann

8 posts

Wannabe Geek

#1019428 6-Apr-2014 12:00

Can't blame you for wanting to avoid RAID, i have tried to keep away from it also. A much bigger can of worms that i want to open, especially with my AMD system.

hagrid:
...Are you saying if I merge 2 separate drives they will appear as a single 6TB drive but if one drive fails I wont be able to assess the data on the other drive as it's essentially 1 drive?
I'm running win 7 btw...

Pretty much, essentially what you are doing is spanning a volume across both the disks. What you see in my computer is basically the volumes on all your drives so it will show up here as one 'drive'. Unfortunately yes, to the best of my knowledge, the loss of one of the drives in the collection will result in the volume no longer being recognized/running correctly in windows, this doesn't necessarily mean the data would be lost, depending on how close together the parts of each file is stored, but it would be relatively difficult to recover.

Microsoft say [i]"A spanned volume is a dynamic volume consisting of disk space on more than one physical disk. If a simple volume is not a system volume or boot volume, you can extend it across additional disks to create a spanned volume, or you can create a spanned volume in unallocated space on a dynamic disk.

You need at least two dynamic disks in addition to the startup disk to create a spanned volume. You can extend a spanned volume onto a maximum of 32 dynamic disks.

Spanned volumes are not fault tolerant."[i]

Which is pretty damn vague but gives you the idea of what it is doing.

I made the conscious decision to just do it (i have 2x 3TB drives in this sort of setup) as i am not going to cry myself to sleep if i lose my media, i can always get it again (via strictly legitimate channels)

, however, i have made a backup of all my photo's as i couldn't bear losing 15 years of family photo's.

Good luck,

hagrid

72 posts

Master Geek
Inactive user

#1019443 6-Apr-2014 12:55

the only benefit it provides is to allow windows to see it as one single drive? and does it split bits of the same data across two drives so to access 1 thing it would read both disks at the same time?

hio77

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#1019447 6-Apr-2014 13:21

Sideface:
NonprayingMantis: have you considered that in the world of high/no limit data caps, vdsl/ufb speeds, and services like Netflix and bittorrent, there is not really much need anymore to store TBs of TV/movie data anymore, since you can instantly stream, or download in minutes, whatever content you want whenever you want it.

Most of us don't live in this Utopian world.
So for the time being we need local storage that we have control over.
I vote for NAS.

i personally live in this "utopian world".

however, i store all my TV shows and movies (mainly TV) on a fileserver.

this has a few benefits, firstly the gf knows how to use it with ease.

secondly, thoses dire times when your without interwebs, your content is still there (i aint streaming over my 3G..)

lastly, it becomes portable when needed..

for my storage, i run several 2TB disks (my disk collections were built before 3TB+s were common), in a UnRAID machine.

reason i choose to do it this way, there is some fault resilience due to the parity protection (if my collection truely looses a disk i cant recover, oh well. not like im in need of a RAID 1 here), another feature that personally attracts me, is the fact that the data is stored on the disks alone, no striping and so i could take out a disk and read it on its own if i had to.

i went through a period of having mirrored collections, the collection grew too big. then i got to the stage of multiple 2TB disks holding the collection and while i could have organized it better, it was a case of TV Shows 1 TV Shows 2 TV Shows 3 and searching each disk.

added advantage of the fileserver use WOL, so it sleeps when its not needed, wake it up with a simple shortcut, and the whole collection is right there.

#include <std_disclaimer>

Any comments made are personal opinion and do not reflect directly on the position my current or past employers may have.

dandamann

8 posts

Wannabe Geek

#1019455 6-Apr-2014 13:46

hagrid: the only benefit it provides is to allow windows to see it as one single drive? and does it split bits of the same data across two drives so to access 1 thing it would read both disks at the same time?

Nope, to do that you would need some form of RAID array as i mentioned above. Or as already mentioned, get a fileserver or a NAS. The spanned volume still only stores one copy of each file/byte.

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