Creating a Home Media and Backup Drive

[MacB]

So, have been musing on this for a while and it seems to be one of those subjects where the amount of info available online is just overwhelming. What I'd like to do is:-

have a hard drive with all of our films, music, photos and data stored and also backed up

have that hard drive accessible over our home network and via the TV as well

So far I've identified a company that will come to the house and collect all of our photos and camcorder stuff, plus any old documents etc, and then transfer that all onto digital media for us. I'm sorting through the pics etc at the moment so that we're not storing duplicates or rubbishy scenery shots that no-one remembers.

Once I've got that back, I assume on DVD or maybe on a hard drive, then I want to get everything onto a central hub. I've looked at some things that I think would do the trick, about 6TB of storage and a duo drive setup, so everything you load is copied to both drives as backup. From what I can see I'd connect it directly to our home hub/router and make it available over the home wireless network.

To use the data over the TV then I could just plug in a USB dongle? or would it need a hard wired connection for speed?

Has anyone done anything like this and are DVDs etc watchable via this method?

 

[defy-one]

Well done first of all in thinking about BACKUPS. So many folks don't and the cry when family pictures are lost forever.

The solution your looking at is fundamentally sound. A high end storage NAS box will do hardware mirroring (write your data to both disks). Some even come with software you can load onto your main PC and it will do an automatic back to the NAS box once a day/week/month.
To stream stuff onto your TV then a ethernet (wired) or wifi (usb dongle) will be required.

I back all my stuff up to DVD and pull what i want off ,to a USB pen,pop that into the TV to watch. Works ok but i should look into the more elegant solution as you are currenty doing

 

[MacB]

thanks D1 and I actually know what NAS means now having had a read...just in case anyone wants to know it's Network Attached Storage. So I've identified 3 options here:-

Drobo 5N
QNAP TS419P II
Synology 1511+

These all seem to be a server box, each with a 1GB internet connection that wires via LAN straight to the home hub/router.

They have multiple slots(or bays) for you to slide in hard drives of your choice, I think you can get up to 3TB drives. At least the Drobo and Synology allow for mismatching of drive type and size without loss of space. Other NAS devices will only recognise space as a multiple of your smallest drive. So if you put in 3x3TB and 1x1TB drives they would only see a total of 4TB, rather than 10TB, available. They all do backup/mirroring functionality which I find is called RAID5/6 or beyondRAID and you can also have a cloud backup as well.

For the DVD stuff I should be able to use DVD Shrink for burning and Handbrake for making them playable?

I would love to hear opinions on the 3 NAS devices I've listed, the best hard drives to buy and the software to use, particularly any downsides or alternatives to what I've gleaned so far. I did find a lot of trashtalking re the Drobo FS model which the 5N has superceded. The Drobo seems tempting as it is rated as very easy for the non expert to use. But equally I don't mind buying in a bit of expert help to get the initial setup of something done. I'd also be keen on an option that gave the best support or reliability options.

The PC that would be used to set things up runs XP if that matters.

 

[Mr Haematocrit]

I run a couple of Western Digital my books which are great little devices, they however run Linux which makes them easily modified. I have one which acts as my web cache, one which is my bittorrent server, one which is my media centre storage and can stream any audio and video format without conversion, great little cost effective devices.

http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/hacks-and-howto

I'm not a fan of mass produced NAS aimed at the home market its generally lacking in many areas and made to fix a price rather than specification, IMHO you would be able to address your needs for far cheaper, an old PC with raid card setup with a RAID1 or RAID5 configuration running a decent server OS such as CentOS could pretty much offer this functionality and so much more.

 

[MacB]

Hmmm, I know what you mean V and I have read a couple of knowhow type threads/blogs on how to do this. But it's a bit more Heath Robinson than I was hoping to go. But maybe you're right and at my budget, probably up to £2k, I may not be getting the level of functionality and future proofing I'd like.

 

[defy-one]

Be careful with disks sizes. When disks are set up to stripe mirror or RAID5, they always lose some space to create the raidset and parity information. This parity information helps rebuild the reaidset should a disk fail and you replace it with a new one.
If you have the option, go for a NAS box that can take 3 disks as a minimum.

3 x 1TB disks would give you 2Tb useable storage space in a RAID5 configuration.
2 x 1TB disks would give you 1Tb in a RAID 1 (mirror) configuration

As you see,there is always an overhead

 

[MacB]

The three I was looking have 4 or 5 bays and the 5N also has an additional accelerator bay so I could have an SSD in there and HDDs in the 5 bays. Apparently this is an improvment in speed over all HDDs but not as fast as all SSDs, however you retain the higher storage capacity of the HDDs.

Thinking more on it I reckon my priorities are reliability and future proofing, I'm more of a plug and play type of user, I don't want to be forever tinkering. I think 5 bays accepting up to 3TB each should be enough but you can also get extension devices to add in as well. I know and accept that all kit can fail, hence wanting the 'hot swap' capability, single or dual mirroring and additional periodic cloud backup(happy to pay the annual fees on this). To that end I'm thinking of my spend priority going towards the framework/chassis quality re futureproofing, reliability and software, plus upgradeability. The drives themselves I just see as plug and play and they can be lesser to begin with, or not fill up all the bays.

One things for sure, just by getting into reading further I've suddenly created a very steep learning curve for myself

 

[Deleted member 26715]

Under no circumstances buy a Linksys ShareCenter NAS-320 they are a waste of space & more importantly to a Yokshireman money.

Alan...

 

[Andrew_Culture]

Under no circumstances buy a Linksys ShareCenter NAS-320 they are a waste of space & more importantly to a Yokshireman money.

Alan...

Ditto the Netgear network storage, utter frustrating poopy bums.

 

[MacB]

well I'm off the Drobo idea as too many dire warnings though still little info on the new 5N device. Apart from Drobo itslef which indicates all previous issues are sorted, but then they would say that...makes me nervous. It's a shame as the Drobo platform really looks ideal but if it's still buggy then it's no good for me.

QNAP is failing a bit as well, not happy with some of the reviews.

so that brings me to Synology and I've already discovered that the 1511+ is discontinued so I'm not touching that. I could get a complete Synology DS412+ preloaded with 4x4TB HDDs for £1.3k.

Also found the usual problem of when to dive in as the next great thing is just around the corner and I've noted that a few of the NAS offerings use discontinued chips etc.

 

[The Brewer]

I just have my 2tb x2 hard drives attached to the main desktop PC and stream wired and wirelessly to the TV, laptops and tablets.
Seems to work okay and I update the drives when needed, would another configuration work better

 

[Crackle]

Good luck on this. Even putting one in in a commercial environment and getting decent performance is a nightmare.

 

[Andrew_P]

Good luck on this. Even putting one in in a commercial environment and getting decent performance is a nightmare.

Must admit I gave up on a NAS drive for home. I use WDlive with hard drive attached, and store everything important on Dropbox. If you have TB's of stuff you can send cloud based servers a hard disk and just update with new files.

 

[Glenn]

Windows Home Server 2011 with Drivepool does what the OP requires. http://www.wegotserved.com/category/how-to/whs-2011-how-to/

 

[MacB]

Ta folks, well the Drobo is definitely out, I hadn't realised that their beyondRaid actually means a proprietary storage method only readable by another Drobo device...too Apple controlling for my taste.

Assuming that my understanding of the Synology options is correct then they store in a file format readable by any device.

Crackle, I'm not approaching this without a fair degree of trepidation and I won't pull the trigger until I'm happy with my choices and I understand workarounds I may need to indulge in. For example already read a few threads about getting the Virgin superhub working properly with NAS as it apparently doesn't plug and play out of the box. Though I know that SW upgrades and even a new box are in the near future pipeline for Virgin. Right now their Superhub works well in many ways but lags far behind BT Infinity for wireless connectivity, weak signal being the main problem. But I use a netgear plug in to boost the signal to overcome that.