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Best way to totally not add more porn storage to my HTPC? (no really)
Form of Monkey!
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Problem: I have an HTPC in the living room that does not have enough storage to accommodate my whole media library. I've got perhaps 3-4 TB worth of material on it at the moment, and after ripping every DVD, every Blu-Ray, almost every CD I own into expensive, nearly-lossless formats, this sucker is filled up. I have no more room to grow. I should have planned better when I built this thing, or tried to be smarter about the size of what I was encoding from the start, but it is what it is. I appear stuck:
- There are no more available SATA ports on the PC, and no more physical room to add more hard drives within the PC case itself
- The card slots are all filled up with TV tuner cards, since this same PC is used as a DVR
What do I do? I've priced dedicated NAS boxes that seem to meet my needs probably even better than what I'm doing now, but that kind of outlay for a combination enclosure + switch is way more than I'd like to spend on this.
I've looked at various USB-based enclosures, and they all seem like a messy, unreliable way of doing this, and with the added downside of the 3.5" enclosures needing AC power sources and not being part of my remote controlled suspend / power on setup
Am i...am I missing something here? Do I have no choice but to build a Linux box that I can access with Samba? I've been combing Newegg looking for easy answers, with little success. How would you fix this problem?
- There are no more available SATA ports on the PC, and no more physical room to add more hard drives within the PC case itself
- The card slots are all filled up with TV tuner cards, since this same PC is used as a DVR
What do I do? I've priced dedicated NAS boxes that seem to meet my needs probably even better than what I'm doing now, but that kind of outlay for a combination enclosure + switch is way more than I'd like to spend on this.
I've looked at various USB-based enclosures, and they all seem like a messy, unreliable way of doing this, and with the added downside of the 3.5" enclosures needing AC power sources and not being part of my remote controlled suspend / power on setup
Am i...am I missing something here? Do I have no choice but to build a Linux box that I can access with Samba? I've been combing Newegg looking for easy answers, with little success. How would you fix this problem?
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1. Add more internal storage (which you said you don't have space or ports for)
2. Use external storage (usually USB or NAS which you don't sound particularly interested in either)
3. Replace the hard drives you already have with bigger ones. This might be an option for you depending on how big your current drive(s) are.
Outside of #3, you've pretty much covered your options and are going to have to just pick one. As for "am I missing something here?", the answer is unfortunately, not really. You're pretty spot on. Of you're options, I would probably bite the bullet and fork out for a NAS, but I'm not you.
Edit- I should add, when I was shopping for a NAS, 2-bays are going to be cheaper to buy as a NAS than building a small linux station, but if you really want to go 4-bay+ you can probably do it for cheaper just building it yourself.
Otherwise, Synology is probably the highest regarded name in Home NAS atm, and sell a very good 2-disk box for about $200: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822108095
and then it's about $130-150 for 3TB drives atm which is about where the sweet spot for GB/price is atm.
I *think* what I'm going to do is bite the bullet and replace the hard drives that are in there with 3 TB models, and then use my lower capacity drives as backups.
The original hard drives were bought in a bygone era when 500 GB was considered a lot of storage space (500 GB? get out of town!) along with 1 TB (a terabyte?? impossible!). Now that the 3 TB parts both exist and don't seem too pricey, this seems like a solid way to more than double my storage space.
I also now view building a low power, mini-ITX based NAS using FreeNAS and < $100 in Newegg parts as a very doable project down the road. If anything, this problem has opened my eyes to the cheapness and ease with which such a thing could be constructed.
Again, really appreciate the ideas.
They're tiny, unobtrusive, and super set-and-forget. I like their auto sleep/wake power management, which means it's better than using an old tower (and most tiny custom builds). I'd check out their website, because they've got a real slick browser-based UI. Also doubles as a neat RAID device/webserver/music server/etc. I paid $200 for mine (before drives) and haven't looked back.
This is true for small 1-2 bay NAS, but the price different becomes pretty stark when you start looking at 4+ bays. A 4 bay NAS can easily be $500+. You could build a completely brand new decent computer for that kind of money. You could easily build a tower with a new low end cpu, and like 12+ bays for the same price. So unless space/time is super important to you, it just doesn't really make sense in my mind.
Something like this?
I have the 16 TB model; it's fast - easily 300 MB/s off the thing with peaks above 450 occasionally. It goes to sleep when the computer does as well, but it does require an AC adaptor. Also, if you want to record to the drive, you won't have a problem doing it - I have done 60 FPS uncompressed FRAPS videos at 1280x800 with no problem.
That link indicates the 16TB model is $1,500 dollars. Is that what you spent? If so, any particular reason why? It seems like I could build a decent desktop that happens to have 16TB of storage for $1,500.
3TB drive should be about 150ish. 5 of those, and you've got 15 TB. Obviously your space goes down if you RAID it or something.
Personally I'd grab that $750 in hard drives, another $100 or so in a SSD, and build a media PC around it.
NAS themselves are pretty low performance in general. You could probably bang together a halfway decent NAS/Media box with 16TB for $1200 and some change.
This is what I was going to suggest. Filling up a case these days will get you way more than 4 TB of space :P
I got mine for $1322.47, with one day shipping. Worked fine out of the box, still works fine today. One potential issue (forgot to mention this): It takes about 30-40 extra seconds on boot to initialize. Once you are in Windows though, your'e golden. The drive is not treated like removable storage in windows, it is treated like an actual hard drive.
PS - 4TB hard drives are $300+. Remember, this is an engineered solution, designed to work out of the box, with a warranty.
If you don't need 16TB, you could get the 12TB model for $845.99 right now on amazon.
EDIT: had the link for the 12TB drive pointing to the 16TB drive