Big RAID hard drive options for storing media center videos

[m021478]

I am getting tired of buying 2 identical hard drives for every 1 drive I add to my storage mix (I've always used the 2nd drive as a backup/clone of the 1st drive - and for truly sensitive data, I often buy a 3rd drive for off-site storage backup)

I am searching for a single large storage device that I can use as my primary multimedia hard drive, to use for storing and serving (across my LAN) all of my videos ~ DVD rips, handbrake conversions, downloads, etc. ~ to my Mac-Mini Media Center (from which I plan to use Plex to playback my media on my living room plasma).

I was thinking about using something along the lines of the semi-newly released DroboPro, but I realize that this may in fact be overkill and it might wind up costing several thousand dollars more than some other perfectly viable options...not to mention that I am not even sure if it's possible share media stored on the DroboPro across my LAN while at the same time avoiding any skipping, stuttering, or lagging of the streaming media...)

The Big Picture:

• I need something with data redundancy (i.e. RAID protection)
• I need something with lots of storage space (something in the range of 8-12 Terabytes should tide me over for a couple years)
• Having something Rack Mounted in my 12U 19" Xrack Pro would be ideal (but I could also deal with something that is not rack mountable, if need be)

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated... Thanks!

 

[jakerules133]

I'm a big fan of the drobo pro just because I don't like spending time to figure stuff out. There is no way in hell I could have the patience to setup a RAID Array and fully understand it.

The next closest thing that I've heard that people use instead of a Drobo Pro is a Buffalo Terra station.

Check it out here

http://www.buffalotech.com/products/network-storage/terastation/terastation-pro-ii-rackmount/


Edit : just found this too http://www.buffalotech.com/products/network-storage/linkstation/linkstation-quad/

 

[stagi]

check out the ready nas products also i have a nV+ that works great!

 

[pprior]

I have not seen any actual performance data from the drobopro yet. I own the Firewire version of the Drobo and while it's very convenient to use, it is not at all high performance. I routinely get only 20mb/sec write speeds. So point one - will the drobopro give you enough speed for primary storage needs (I use mine only for time machine backups)

Secondly, even with drobopro's pseudo Raid-6 backup method (can lose 2 drives and still have intact data), it's still dangerous to rely on any single drive array for your data.

Third - the drobopro is not network aware, AFAIK, so you'd have to share it. And I think best performance comes from iSCSI so you'll need a computer with a free ethernet port and that computer will have to be on whenever you want access from another network device.

Depends on what budget you have and noise sensitivity. Again the drobopro is really quite reasonably priced for what you get, but the performance would be my main concern based on what I've seen with it's little brother.

 

[misterredman]

Build yourself a computer system and use FreeNAS:

www.freenas.org