I'm tired of the clutter in my family room.

When I first built my set up 5 years ago I liked it. Four 15s, 3m wide screen, storage for 1000s of movies etc.

But now, I want to get rid of it. I want to make the whole thing 250mm deep instead of 600mm and replaster the wall so it's all flush and hidden. I plan to remake my speakers and just have press-in cloth grilles for L, R and C. This will mean a change to 12' woofers, but I'll simply go up a model to conserve the output.

This brings me to media. I want to sell off all 800 of my DVDs while they still have some value (unlike my 200+ laserdiscs).

Is it feasible to build a PC with a very high quality video card (1080p / blu ray / HDMI 1.3) with virtually unlimited storage? I figure I need 4 terabytes just for my existing DVDs. Now with Blu Ray and 30gig movies I want to "future proof" and allow expansion to 20/30/50+ terabytes?

Can I do this? Can I build a machine now, possible upgrading it down the track? Can I simply move the hard discs to a new machine in 5, 10+ years time?

Phil

Raid 5 - 8 port card (at least). look to 3 ware
750gig hdds are best value for storage
HDMI 1.3 there actually is no "all in one" solution. auzentech make a HDMI 1.3 sound card which needs to be run in series with a HDMI GFX card.

You can do it now and continually upgrade - its a LOT of work and $$$ though to get it all to work seemlessly and who knows how much capacity you really need in the future?

I'm in the process of doing similar myself I'm building a 7TB raid 5 server and this will feed a sarotech or similar media server - this way the server and its noisy hard drives are kept out of the media room and the sarotech has HDMI 1.3 support out of the box so I dont need to doctor up a solution.

plus I can load a few movies onto a 1tb drive in the Sarotech and take them with me where ever

you could just get this
http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores...552921665231960

and then http://www.ht.com.au/N/Storage-Disk-Storag...rnet/detail.hts

Seems a bit expensive for only 4TB......

Phil

Decent raid card = $1000
5 x 1Tb drives in raid 5 config for 4 tb storage = $1400
plus PSU
Plus case

etc

So whilst I think thats a little pricey I can also see where the $ are.
Not forgetting they are probably using enterprise quality drives too which are more $
Plus they probably have special software for controlling them etc

Mass storage is not going to be cheap.

There are usually 2 ways of going about it, the better way and the cheap way.

The cheap way would be to just grab as many 1TB drives as you can afford and chuck them in a PC case without and Raid config. Or go raid 5 and get an extra disk.

The better way would be to buy a fibre attached disk shelf or something similar. That way you can extend the shelf or add more drives when the need arrises. This is going to cost you big dollars though, but if you have the cash, it's the way to go. Lots of room for going bigger, plenty of redundancy to stop failures, and quick drive access.

I looked into disk shelves when I decided to do this but they are all SCSI based so they are expencive for SFA storage

I agree that it's expensive. We get Fibre attached Shelves at work and they all run SAS drives.

Having a look a HP StorageWorks MSA70 holds 25 SAS disks, the largest being 147GB's so 25 of those is around 3.5TB's and at around $19,000 it's not what you call cost effective.

The cheaper way is the way to go for the man on the street, but even still it's still going to run into several thousands.

Sigmeister any reason why you suggest against raid 5 with a GOOD raid controller?

My entire 7TB setup should come in at under 4k

Nope, just cost.
And probably configuring.

I don't know everyones skill level, so I just assume everyone is a dumbass and go from there.

LOL fair call - but I would have thought a disk shelf would be harder to implement than a fairly simple raid 5 config.

what is a Sarotech exactly?


I am planning on doing this or something similar soon, but nothing quite that big, jsut after something that i can hook up to my 46" FULLHD 1080P tv and watch DIVX and the likes on it and easy to transfer file to and from it.

what would u sugest for this purpose.


SSS_Hoon

Divx on HD 1080p?? thats like watchin porn on a mobile, it's a novilty, but in reality, it sucks.

http://www.sarotech.com/english/product/dvp-570s.html
^ Thats a Sarotech

Theres also
http://www.kjglobal.co.uk/acatalog/TVIX_M-6500A.html
The TVIX looks good and seems to be more popular

LoL, i use my DVD player and scale it down to 720p or depending on how bad the file is down to 480/576i

Its the main TV (only tv) in the house so we have to use it to watch stuff on LoL.

i will check those links out later when i have some more time(like when im at work tomorz)

SSS_Hoon

had a look at them, and where can they be bought from in australia though?

Was thinking something along the lines of something like that, as i already have a DVR with inbuilt Digital tuner only sd though not hd and a 160gig HDD in there but would like another.

i was thinking of a PVR of somesort with twin HD tuners in there or something.

What are the USB HDTV tuner like that go in laptops as also was thinking about getting a decent laptop with HDMI out and using a HDTV tuner card and outputing it either straight to my tv or through my dvd and inturn through my sound system, then that way i can play all types of files not just divx.

SSS_Hoon

I dont think any laptops have HDMI 1.3 WITH audio

Without researching I would still back you up on that 100%

My laptop was one of the first models to have HDMI output, really its a novelty I cannot even get any sound out of it. Its also unreliable. I don't like getting the first models of anything really, there is always a problem with them - generalising here.

guide to building a HD HTPC here, there's a section for a home media server there too.

if you're worried about noise can always just opt for some larger yate loon fans etc

my ten cents.

have a peek in the PC guide here somewhere too, there's a section on HTPCs

speaking of which, i actually had my first go on one last night at a friends place. great stuff. so easy.

or PCI to SATA cards u dont need expensive ones if your just watching movies

a radeon card with HDMI output

if you convert your movie collection, thats 700mb a DVD.

so get a micro ATX mobo with 6 SATA connections that 4.5TB

then later on get a PCI to SATA card with 4 ports on it.

$120 x however many 750gigers u want.

~$150 for the MOBO

the PCI SATA card should be less than $100

probs $250 will get u a good radeon card.

also DVI can be adapted to HDMI with no audio. so if you have a decent graphics card without HDMI that can do for you

ewwwww

no. thanks

The difference between a 700mb rip and a dvd is quite noticeable. I'd say Phil would be trying to keep it all at 100% quality. even in H264 or .mkv I don't think you could get it to that size and maintain quality, let alone the amount of time it would take to encode it all.

A large redundant NAS array would be your cheapest bet. But to be honest Phil, the amount of time & money you need to invest on space saving is hardly worth it. Figure how long its going to take you to "back up" all your media. Weeks.

Not to mention in 5 years theres a chance that one or more of your HDD's would have failed, meaning you'll have to go out and replace the whole system regardless. DVDs in their safe packaging will outlast any other setup, buld the library behind the sofa?

Media servers FTW

Tucker there is a BIG difference between a good card like the 3ware that I'm using and the cheaper PCI "raid" cards.

For a start - most of the cheaper cards use processor power because they dont have their own on board processors. As such they slow the PC down and they are unreliable. Im ripping my DVDs at full ISO. Average size is about 5.5gig a disc.

Im looking to invest in a TVIX media player soon they are about $800AUD landed and connect to the media server via ethernet plus I can add a 1tb drive to the media player and when I'm heading to the holiday house just copy over a few movies onto the TVIX and take it with me. Power, Unit and HDMI cable and I'm set. The thing I like about the TVIX is it does HDMI 1.3 with digital audio so one cable to the TV (or av reciver) and your set! The only way (at this stage) te get a similar result with a PC is to go HDMI out of the GFX into an Auzentech HDMI card then out. Im a little concerned by this idea regarding picture / audio sync plus its expencive and its not very compact. The TVIX unit - simply works

My 3ware card (which is now called something else) was about $900 before the AUD was performing so well so can probably be picked up cheaper. I got the 8 port version. In hind site I'd probably get a bigger card if I could afford it and I'd use 750gig HDD.

You can get enterprise and AV HDD which have a longer life time. Plus with a GOOD raid card you can swap out HDDs 1 at a time to allow the array to rebuild onto new HDD before any of them die in the ass.

Im using Raid 5 so I can rebuild. I would have liked to go raid 6 but to do that and to keep a reasonable amount of storage space I really should have gone a 12 port card - oh well live and learn. I know what to do next time

I "should" have enough space to keep about 1200 DVDs. But remember we're all going to be switching to bluray soon which takes up more space. Plus I want to be able to keep my music on there - I can see 7tb of storage space getting chewed up in a very short time frame. The only thing that worries me with my setup is - if theres a house fire I'll loose all my DVDs plus all my data - but I guess thats why I've taken out a $15k policy on CDs and DVDs which should cover some of it.

Sparkles, I'd be very keen to hear how you go with your TVIX (If you get one). I have been looking at one of these for ages but no one sells them locally (That I could find)

I think the 6500 was the one I was looking at a while back. All formats, HDMI, HDD, USB etc. etc.

Agreed.
I'm poor so I have my media PC connected to an old 90cm widescreen CRT.
At 700-900mb per movie using DivX (or similar) this looks good.
However, i've tried it on my brothers mates plasma and it's watchable, but not what i'd call good.
If you were to re-encode for a large plasma / LCD / projector, i'd say that 1.5Gb would be the absolute minimum file size for an average length movie to look good, regardless of codec.

I doubt i'd be anywhere near as anal about SQ as Phil () so you could probably add another 500mb.

So, I don't think Phil was looking at re-encoding, and i'd agree, it would be a waste of time.
Most of the good PC PVR systems have a facility to load ISO's anyway.

nerds. lol.
put dvds in another room. get your kids to go get the one you want to watch.

expensive way of doing it but it works. (not all the time tho and after a run in period of about 5years)

There's a few HDMI vid cards around, one I saw had a S/PDIF input for the audio (just jump it to the internal Digital Out).

one disk standard has outlasted all the others - SCSI. The discs are more expensive outlay, but you can always just add more when the ones you have get too full. Otherwise NAS is a good way to go.

TVIX 6500A can be had from PC case gear for $499 plus P&H
Doesnt include tuner but the tuner can be had from scorptec for $125 + P&H

just for any one interested - if I had the funds I'd be getting one tomorrow!

oh and the Auzentech hometheatre soundcard isnt being released until january ...