Quoting 8ballMax:

Quote:
I was contemplating doing the same thing until I averaged the time it would take to rip every DVD/Blu-ray disc in my collection. At approx. 45 minutes per disc it would take 211,500 minutes/3,525 hours/147 days. That’s without taking a break   If I ripped for 4 hours a night after work it would take 881 days to finish the 4,768 discs in my collection. That’s 2 ½ years .

Wow! I just spent about 3 weeks adding my mother's cd collection (and it wasn't her whole collection) on her computer. Total time was probably about 20-24 hours over the 3 weeks. I couldn't imagine over 2 years of doing that! That's insane!

Quoting Dr. Killpatient:

Quote:

Utilizing RAID5, you can get 6 TB of data storage with 4 drives. Assuming an average of 6 GB for a DVD, that should hold your entire DVD collection.

...and you need a same amout of disc space for backup.

The RAID controller I posted earlier supports RAID50 which is a striped array of multiple RAID 5 sets.  If I have two RAID 5's each with 4 drives, each set could suffer 1 drive failure with no data loss but if I lose two drive in either array, everything's toast.

But the nice thing about RAID arrays is that you can allocate a hot spare that will immediately take over a failed drive and start rebuilding. When the failed drive is replaced, it becomes the new hot spare.

Typing out the following to brainstorm the pros and cons of each RAID setup to balance redundancy, speed, and capacity - though speed isn't really a big issue for this utilization.

So I could do the following with my 8 1.5 TB drives utilizing 4 drives in each RAID 5 set:

Two RAID 5's independent of each other with no hot spare for a 4.5 TB per array or 9 TB total. Can suffer 1 drive failure per array. Losing one array doesn't affect the other array.

Two RAID 5's independent of each each other with a hot spare for 3 TB per array or 6 TB total. Can suffer 2 drive failures per array as long as two drives don't fail at the same time. Losing one array doesn't affect the other array.

RAID 50 with no hot spare for one array of 9 TB. Can suffer 2 drive failures as long as both drives aren't part of the same set. Losing one set causes total data loss.

RAID 50 with 1 hot spare per set for one array of 6 TB. Can suffer 4 drive failures as long as more than 2 drives per set don't fail at the same time. Losing one set causes total data loss.

I'm currently using Boxee with three 1 TB drives (no RAID) - the drive layout is invisible to me and since speed isn't a priority, RAID 50's seem to be out of the picture.

Based on the failure rate of the previous method of conversion I used which introduced either skipping or audio-sync issues, I'm redoing my collection in MKV format which is a lossless conversion and so far, no audio-sync issues. I'm only storing the main movie and none of the extras, each movie containing only the highest quality audio track and no sub-titles (though I have the option of multiple audio-tracks & subtitles) with the exception of Blu-Ray where I include the forced subtitles. Sizes are based on 1k=1000 bytes since that's the formula drives use. Current conversion process:

DVD
55 movies ranging between 2.18GB and 7.29GB, averaging 4.8 GB. Estimated to be able to store 208 movies per TB.

Blu-Ray & HD-DVD
50 movies ranging between 10.27GB and 31.43GB, averaging 18.72GB. Estimated to be able to store 53 movies per TB.

I briefly looked at UNRAID, one feature I liked is that you could in-line upgrade a drive to a larger capacity drive and have the extra storage utilized.  I think I'll look more into it.

Nevermind