im done with high end gaming rigs...

T

Tangent inc.

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 5, 2006
Messages
398
after nearly ten years of cream of the crop gaming rigs i have decided the cost is not justifiable. the past few years i have been playing less and less games and buying more and more movies. i share a house with a few close friends and they are in the same boat. i feel centralized media storage and backup space is worth more then the games i play once in a blue moon.

my original plan was to make my htpc the data storage center of my home network. the more i dug, the less appealing this became so i have opted for dedicated network storage. i know many of the storage junkies start in the same place (large tower) and migrate to a rack chassis. i am content with a stacker and four 5in3 hot swap cages. i am planning on a 14 drive array of WD5000ABYS, single disk os and 2 hot spares. out of a twenty pack i will still have a few drives for whatever.

after a few months of research the Areca 1261ML stands out having the features i am looking for and supports the number of drives i want. on paper this looks great though, i am still trying to stomach the cost of the controller and battery sister card. the case, cages and wires will happen soon. in this research i like what freebsd has to offer. i am still looking into the cons but that side of the fence still looks greener. i have never dealt with this segment of the computer industry but i have learned the hard way till this point, no reason to change that now.

i am willing to spend about $600 on the mobo, cpu and mem. the coolers are not included in that budget and will all be passive parts. from my fellow [H]asses i would like some suggestions on what would work in my stated budget. all of the storage is going to be a joint effort on the wallet. i am only paying for the system and chassis parts.

i hope i am going the right direction ;)
 
I hear ya. I used to like to buy a bleeding edge gaming box every couple years, but as of late I haven't felt the need. I just blew $10k setting up servers instead, heh. I find that the games I still play every now and again run just fine on my Dell's integrated Radeon X1300 so I've felt no need for a gaming rig anymore. If anything, I'd rather spend the $3000 I'd spend on a gaming rig to buy several Dells of the caliber I'm using now so I can have four or five friends come over to game w/o them having to fuss with bringing computers and stuff.
 
Tangent inc. said:
After a few months of research the Areca 1261ML stands out having the features i am looking for and supports the number of drives i want. on paper this looks great though, i am still trying to stomach the cost of the controller and battery sister card.
Click to expand...

Since this is for a home network have you considered linux softraid? I run a home server that is using mdadm under ubuntu. I have expanded the raid 5 array twice with out any data loss or any problems what-so-ever. When it comes to hardware all you'll have to do is make sure that you have the sata drives on a bus that has enough speed -pci e/x whatever, for your needs.

Just wondering where are you buying your drives from? A 20pack? How much will that run you is it cheaper than buying individually.
 
a 20 pack of the 500 gig RE2 drives runs about $3k. it is not always cheaper but many places with decent prices limit per order quantity. the WD5000ABYS can be had for $130ish so if i can get 20 at that price i will but 20pk at $150 each is still not bad.

for peace of mind i want to stick with hardware. not that soft raid is bad or anything i just favor it.

i have seven computers in the house and we all share about 200 dvd's. everyone in the house cries about space and we can only share movies if every computer is on. to cure this i would like dedicated media storage. between the four of use we have in excess of 600 titles foreign and domestic. one of my friends is big on anima, i am into action/horror, scifi and my brother loves comedy. my other buddy offloads tivo stuff onto his pc and that stuff is huge.

the case, cages, wires, psu and controller run in at about $1500. with $600 for the system and $3k in drives thats just over five thousand dollars in the next five months or so.

any suggestions on system parts that will keep up with four people and the storage parts i listed.
 
I agree with you. My storage needs cost much more than my gaming needs. Last year(2006) I spent nearly $5k on storage. I only spent $2k on my desktop in that same time period. I'm about to drop another $3k on storage(February, tax returns) this year, possibly another $3k before the end of the year, depending on my storage needs(Hopefully it will take more than a year to fill another 4TB of space). I am not even considering upgrading my desktop till maybe the end of the year, if not later(No real reason to, I have a release 8800GTX).

If you are spending $150/drive on 500GB drives, you may want to consider going with 1TB drives. You can get the Seagate 1TB drives for $300 shipped from ZipZoomFly. This increases storage density and allows easier increases in capacity.
Seagate Drives @ ZZF: http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=10005936

Also, it may be cheaper to go directly to rackmount(if you have somewhere to put it to not worry about the noise). You can get a supermicro 15 drive sata rackmount chassis with bays and triple redundant psu for $750, probably a bit less than you would spend for all that in a stacker. If you went with that, you could do 9 drive R6 with 1HS (or 8 drive R5 with 2HS) for probably less than the cost of a 500G drive setup, have more space, and still have room to expand to 10TB of formatted space.

Super Micro case @ Newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811152034&Tpk=CSE-933T-R760B

I would recommend something like a Highpoint card, but you look like you are willing to spend the extra money on the real raid that the areca offers and the data protection. I just use an UPS.
 
Tangent inc. ---

I think you are doing something wrong.

600 movies at about 4GB/movie is 2.5GB. 5 500GB drives + 5 for backup.

WD 5000AAKS's cost about $110. An 8 port PCIe SATA card is about $200.

For $1300 you can have backups for each drive. (No stupid RAID.)

Any of the hard drives is capable of reading or writing at least 10 HD streams. Fast enough for your usage.

Let the hrd drives turn off after 10 minutes. Reduces the heat build up. Makes these little used drives last forever.

---

I have 8 WD5000AAKSs and 3 IDE drives in my media server. And have had no problems.
 
You can get wd aaks for $99 oem now so $150 per drive doesn't sound cost effective. If you're going that route might do what was suggested already and get 1TB you can easily find some 1TB for even under 270ish.
 
dew

i have been toying with the 1tb drives and if the spinpoint get around to $250ish when i start buying them i may jump on it. i want to avoid the issues that come up with wd drives and there error correction dropping them from an array. the re2 drives, samsung and segate drives dont suffer the same issues. the softfix is hit and miss. i do agree ;)
at $180 a piece i need 8 spinpoints to get 6tb of storage in R6 plus two hotspares. that comes to almost $3000 while with the re2 i need fourteen plus two hots and that is why i went with the 20pk. but like you said i like the extra empty space so that sounds better.

i do want to stick with a fully hardware controller as well as use the ups's that i already have. my friend that i have the house with works for a dental contractor(paterson) and brings them home all the time. they are industrial looking arc(i believe) ups's.

i wish i could go the way of the rack but i have no where to set it up. my house lacks the nooks and crannies of other places i have lived. later i may be able to offload all the gear into a rack but my garage gets crazy hot and my closet is the only walk in(8x4) and i share it with a friend i am helping out. it is nice though because if i go that way i have access to rack stuff. my girlfriend works for verari and handles writing stuff off i just don't want to ask for all this expensive ass shit.

GeorgeHR

when it comes to ripping i said titles for a reason. may are multi disk and box sets. on average they are 4-5gb per disk but almost half are 4+ disks per title so the numbers get crazy. i dont watch anime much but that alone will be serious bits to store. most controllers dont like the 5000AAKS drives if there is any data inconstancy and as i said above the softfix does not always take. i love wd and will never stop buying there stuff but the inexpensive ones have there place.

thanks for the help guys... keep it coming
 
aaks drives work just fine in raid, i have 7 of them in raid 5 and no issues with them dropping out of the array. You can use the wd tler utility to enable tler on aaks drives and they work without any issues.
 
I've been running 4 WD10EACS drives in R5 for a month or so, haven't had any issues yet. I just found out about the tler bug and fix on this forum and applied it just to be safe. I figure since I'm doing a 16 drive RAID eventually the cost savings ($330 RE2 - $270 GP x 16 = $960) is worth rolling the dice. I have backups, so I won't sweat it :)

No problems so far though.
 
I'm kinda in the same boat, I am getting ready to go with another 2 tb drives. I have switched to ripping hd dvds and possibly soon blu-rays. Those things eat up around 25gb a pop, so storage is going to outpace my other upgrade needs by a long-shot. Especially since it looks like nvidia's next new chips are going to be later this year, and yorkfield looks unimpressive compared to an overclocked q6600. I am all storage until fall '08. And I would definitely go with enterprise tb drives if the higher cost/gb doesn't bother you. If you plan on sticking with just dvd rips I'm sure you will be ok, but I am already filling up my current 3tb setup and I still have a lot of movies to go.
 
i am going to talk to my girlfriend about the rack stuff. if i can get a short rack and a chassis then i will go that way. drive wise i may just avoid wd consumer drives for raid and continue to use them for everything else. i am definitely going the way of hd-dvd and bluray. i will be picking up the combo drive after i pay all my bill. i think the tb drives will be the only way to go for me so i don't physically run out of space for drives as fast. i will just by a few at a time after i finish the chassis stuff.

thanks for the suggestions. the more the better.
 
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