Storing large collection

[victoriabears]

If I were to simply put my entire dvd collection, of all types, divx/conventional dvd's onto hard drives it would need at least 14 TB, if my desire was to have this as though it were all on one single hard drive, so easy access, what suggestions would you make, all price points, simplest to expensive.

I have just ripped my entire cd collection to my ipod classic and really like the ease of access, of course converting 7000 conventional dvd's to divx for space compression is rather daunting.

My less than educated method would be to simply have a hard drive tower of some sort but wondered what else there might be.

I have just finished converting my vhs collection to dvd, started in 2003 !

[DB83]

I can not make any suggestions as to price, as they would be quite different 'over the pond' but there, I believe, are only two possibile options.

1. You create a RAID array using 2TB disks - you could probably manage up to 12 TB in that way. The weakness here is that, depending on the array one disk down = all disks down.

2. You build a network (LAN) controlled by one PC with the other PCs on the LAN serving that. All the HDDs in the serving PCs could then be independant so if one failed you would not lose the lot. You would still need some form of database to tell you what was on each drive in the event of failure. In fact the database could be written to actually feed the data from the LAN to the viewing PC.

Personally, I would just have a database and a lot of off-pc storage for dvds etc. It aint pretty but it does what it says on the tin.

[victoriabears]

yes I saw 2TB portable hard drives as an option, $150, so I would need 7, and can do it over time, and just index my collection per hard drive, or organise it in some way. yes Hard drive failure is less than it was and they do not last forever but I would simply store the dvd's as backup.

[rcubed]

yes I saw 2TB portable hard drives as an option, $150, so I would need 7, and can do it over time, and just index my collection per hard drive, or organise it in some way. yes Hard drive failure is less than it was and they do not last forever but I would simply store the dvd's as backup.

Victoriabears,
If the OS is Win 32 bit there is a limitation as to the size of a RAID configuration. It is 2TB.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/LUN_SP1.mspx

If you are running a 64 bit version the limit is 256TB.

I was planning on creating a RAID 0 configuration of 5TB using 5 drives in an external enclosure. Unfortunately I am running XP - 32bit. I ended up doing 2x2TB RAID 0, and a JOBD of 1TB. In my case it is for storing video capture, so I didn't need redundancy.

If you plan on using the drives as extended partitions with a logical partition size of 1TB then the only limit is how many letters you can assign to the partitions.

With the tower approach if you decide to go that way should support JOBD - just a bunch of disks. Also with a tower the number of disks assigned to a controller may be limited to 5, so a dual port controller might be needed.

The partition type (primary, extended, or logical) will affect how the drive letters are assigned when the PC is booted up. I believe the max. number of primary partitions is four. I usually configure one primary partition and the rest are logical partitions in an extended partition.

http://en.kioskea.net/contents/repar/partitio.php3

rcubed

[Chopmeister]

You shouldn't need 14 TB - the other option is to encode them to h.264 - at 700-800 MB per movie you should get reasonable quality. I am doing this gradually, albeit for a significantly smaller collection, and can get 10-12 done a day by leaving the system batch encoding over night. At (say) 750 MB you will need about 5TB. A cheapish 4-bay NAS box using 4x2 TB drives in RAID-5 will give you 6TB, with redundancy if a drive fails which shouold fit the lot, or 8TB if you opt for JBOD. Back 'em up to cheap USB external drives in case of more severe failure, esp if you go the JBOD route. That is what I am contemplating purchasing and installing once my (tedious!) encoding marathon is finished.