Purchasing Advice: External 1TB+ media server

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
Morning all you hard working apple insiders.

I'm moving to a small island off vancouver island and have decided despite the garbage copy write laws to rip all my DVDs and leave them at our cabin.



What I need is an external server/hard drive 1TB+ that would offer great speeds so we can watch movies from it through our mac mini to our flat screen TV. We have a Time machine but I don't want to use all the space as its backing up our studio macs.



thoughts?



belly bumps.

flick.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 13
    I am a big fan of Drobo and use one for exactly this purpose.
  • Reply 2 of 13
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Kishan View Post


    I am a big fan of Drobo and use one for exactly this purpose.



    Thats great I hear about Drobo all the time, and the easy to upgrade infrastructure is great.



    what sort of issue might I expect?

    flick.
  • Reply 3 of 13
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Flick Justice View Post


    Thats great I hear about Drobo all the time, and the easy to upgrade infrastructure is great.



    what sort of issue might I expect?

    flick.



    Well, startup cost is considerable. You need to spend money on the Drobo itself even before you start to stock it with drives. It can take 5-10 seconds to spool up if the drives have gone to sleep. Other than those two things, I cannot thing of a single problem that I've had with it.



    My config is a Drobo with two 1TB Western Digital Caviar Greens and two 640GB Western Digital Caviar Greens. It is connected to an iMac via FW800. The iMac is running iTunes 9.0.1 and OS X 10.6. I stream to an Apple TV via an Airport Extreme.



    I cannot speak to the self restorative properties of the Drobo as I've not had a drive fail yet. That being said, I have replaced drives as the Drobo has gotten filled, and while the Drobo is reconstructing the data, I am still able to use it. Despite the Firewire connection, reading and writing to the Drobo is sometimes pokey. There are probably faster solutions out there, but I wouldn't want to trust my entire iTunes library to something that didn't have some redundancy to it.
  • Reply 4 of 13
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by CityofAngels View Post


    I find a 2TB Drobo Bundle , hope it is helpful for u.

    - Drobo 4bay FireWire 800 & USB 2.0 Storage Enclosure Bundled with 2 x 1TB 7200RPM.



    I think the cost of this puts it out of my range.



    Anyone else has a cheaper suggestion?



    flick.
  • Reply 5 of 13
    dfilerdfiler Posts: 3,420member
    I know it isn't cheaper, but the ReadyNAS NV+ is one hell of a product. It even supports AFP and Time Machine. I'm planning on keeping mine for a decade or more...

    (just add bigger drives every 3 or 4 years)
  • Reply 6 of 13
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Flick Justice View Post


    Morning all you hard working apple insiders.

    I'm moving to a small island off vancouver island and have decided despite the garbage copy write laws to rip all my DVDs and leave them at our cabin.



    This sounds like non-critical storage, in that everything on it is already duplicated (i.e., keeping the original DVDs). As such failure of the drive, while annoying and a lot of work to recreate, is not an end-of-the-world scenario. A cheap external USB drive should work just fine, for around $100.
  • Reply 7 of 13
    Well... Since you already have a TC/Airport, why not just get a 2TB USB HDD and plug into the Airport? Cheap (<$150) easy (it just works).
  • Reply 8 of 13
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by KingOfSomewhereHot View Post


    Well... Since you already have a TC/Airport, why not just get a 2TB USB HDD and plug into the Airport? Cheap (<$150) easy (it just works).



    a good thought.. will USB be fast enough to stream movies?
  • Reply 9 of 13
    This is probably the best 1TB external you can get for the money-



    http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other.../ME8SRS10TB32/
  • Reply 10 of 13
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Flick Justice View Post


    a good thought.. will USB be fast enough to stream movies?



    more than fast enough. I stream from a USB2 drive connected to an 802.11n Airport Extreme to a Mac Mini connected to the TV... it handles 1080p just fine from the external drive. (But it's got to be "N" on the WiFi, "G" doesn't quite cut it for HD.)
  • Reply 11 of 13
    dfilerdfiler Posts: 3,420member
    USB will be more than fast enough for watching movies. My only concern would be data lose. Depending on how rich you are and how annoying you find re-ripping everything, it may or may not be worth using a RAID or secondary backup disk for the disk containing your movies.



    I don't back up any of my videos because I haven't invested much effort in acquiring them. Most are recorded off of broadcast television. However, this comes at a cost. I have lost all of my videos on 3 occasions now. Twice for single drive failures on normal hard drives and once from a failed raid controller.
  • Reply 12 of 13
    Ok so I settled on an external 2TB HD.



    Now ripping DVDs.. I've tried Handbrake and mac the ripper.. which do you feel is better? what other options do I have. Does it typically take an hour to rip?



    thanks

    flick.
  • Reply 13 of 13
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Flick Justice View Post


    Ok so I settled on an external 2TB HD.



    Now ripping DVDs.. I've tried Handbrake and mac the ripper.. which do you feel is better? what other options do I have. Does it typically take an hour to rip?



    thanks

    flick.



    Mac the ripper only rips them.... You still have video files in mpeg2 and the DVD wrapper. Handbrake will rip AND transcode to mp4 (or whatever format you like)... Allowing for more portability between devices.



    Depending on your computer... A G4 will take about 4 hours to rip a 1.5 hour movie ... My C2D iMac will rip it in about 3/4 of the time it takes to watch it. (That includes the trascoding to mp4/h264... JUST ripping should be quicker.)
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