Storage Solutions for our OUT-OF-CONTROL iTunes Libraries

[benlangdon]

ya do not have really input but i need to upgrade very soon.
anyway, i have time machine, itunes, and all my movies running on 500gb.
i ran out of space on it like 3 weeks after i bought it .
its a wd drive in some no name enclosure with usb and esata.
unfortunatly its hooked up with usb. i had a esata express card and it just wouldn't work, long story, 5 cards later, nothing.


but that was a while ago so...
when i upgrade, and if it works,
i will be getting a new esata expresscard with two ports
then a 1tb drive that will only be used as time machine, and then i will let my itunes and movies take up the 500gb one and have the tb back up the 500gb one.

i really can't wait to get this.
when my esata card worked, for the brief time it did, it was amazing how fast it was, it was like it wasn't even an external drive, almost.

ya having friends that like and have the space for the same type of movies and music is great, my friend ( a windows user) acidentally deleted all his music, hooked it up to mine and a bunch of hours later, back to normal.

 

[jcosmide]

I am so glad I bit the bullet and bought a drobo. I'm a little busy at the moment, will write more about it when i have time.

Cool, I'm interested to see how people are incorporating them into their setup/ if the drobo's backup of itself is safe enough.

 

[Grimace]

WD launched its 2TB internal drive today. Toss four of those in a Drobo!

 

[prostuff1]

Cool, I'm interested to see how people are incorporating them into their setup/ if the drobo's backup of itself is safe enough.

Drobo can be used as a backup solution but it does not backup itself. It provides data protection but if more then one drive fails in the drobo then you are pretty much screwed. Drobo is very similar to a raid5 but it allows you to mix and match drive sizes. Don't confuse data backup with data protection.


The Drobo is a very impressive little machine and has its place in the NAS market, but you have to understand its limitations. It is very easy to use for the general consumer, but does not allow for a lot of customization.

 

[jcosmide]

Drobo can be used as a backup solution but it does not backup itself. It provides data protection but if more then one drive fails in the drobo then you are pretty much screwed. Drobo is very similar to a raid5 but it allows you to mix and match drive sizes. Don't confuse data backup with data protection.


The Drobo is a very impressive little machine and has its place in the NAS market, but you have to understand its limitations. It is very easy to use for the general consumer, but does not allow for a lot of customization.

Right, thanks for the clarification. I should have said data protection not data backup. In that case, how do all of you who use Drobo for iTunes backup that data?

 

[Cuthbert]

Right, thanks for the clarification. I should have said data protection not data backup. In that case, how do all of you who use Drobo for iTunes backup that data?

Currently, I have two 1 TB hard drives in my drobo - giving me 1 Tb of storage space. I use this 1 TB to:

1. Store my iTunes library
2. As my Time Machine Disk

I suggest going to the Drobo web site and watching the video there to clarify how drobo works - it helped me. The good thing is that when one drive goes down, all of your data is backed up on the other drive. How often will both drives crash at the same time? (unless you are one of the people who bought those 1.5 TB drives...) Also, the drives are hot swappable, which is nice. I haven't had issues to date and have been very happy.

I do however also have a separate 1TB external HD that also holds all of my iTunes content. I plan on storing that off site for extra protection just in case.

Drobos are not cheap! But, to me, it was worth it to have that peace of mind at night. I could have bought separate drives and set up a raid, blah, blah, blah - what a headache! I didn't want to have to deal with doing that. It's easy and quick for some people who have done it before, but I wanted the simplicity of the drobo.

 

[hualon]

Cool, I'm interested to see how people are incorporating them into their setup/ if the drobo's backup of itself is safe enough.

I use my Drobo (4x1TB) as primary storage and it is connected to the mac pro over firewire 800.

I bought an Airport Extreme and hung a 2TB external drive off of it as a backup of the most critical data on the Drobo. This is achieved using Super Duper. This AEBS is set up outside my house in my workshop in case of fire/flood/etc. The AEBS is configure as an extender to my wireless network and its only purpose in life is hosting the hard drive.

There is a 1TB external drive that acts as a Time Machine volume for the mac pro's boot drive.

I use Mozy to maintain an encrypted cloud backup of everything. Yes, it took a LONG time to get it all up there.

Eventually I want to buy a second Drobo and put it on the AEBS in the workshop. Right now I can't fit everything onto the quasi-offsite backup (although everything is on Mozy anyway).

 

[gregorybret]

Where I started… Where I am

I purchase a new iMac in June of 08 with the intent to start converting my movie collection to play on my TV which I got a month or so before. With a 3 year old G router I was up and running in no time.
My first few months were painful. Movies would freeze and skip alot. So I upgraded to an dual band N (draft 2.0) router. That fixed the streaming problem. The 500GB internal drive was filling up quickly so I purchased a 1TB MyBook World Edition NAS. I was very slow to upload my movies to but it streamed to iTunes and TV just fine.
I filled it up in a few month and now I was starting to worry about not having everything backed up. So I just purchased a LaCie 4Big 4TB RAID. Formatted it for RAID 5 for some redundancy. It connected to my iMac with FW800 and is substancially faster than the NAS. It's about a third full and should last for a while, but if need be I can connect up to four 4TB boxes together. I am very happy with my setup now.

 

[jcosmide]

Currently, I have two 1 TB hard drives in my drobo - giving me 1 Tb of storage space. I use this 1 TB to:

1. Store my iTunes library
2. As my Time Machine Disk

Yeah I went back to watch the demo and check out the website a bit more.

So since the Drobo recognizes your array as one volume, you can partition part of it for Time Machine? Or does Time Machine not care if it's on the same volume as something else?

As nice as the Drobo would be to use for iTunes, to have to buy something equally as large to back it up would be cost prohibitive.

 

[Cuthbert]

Yeah I went back to watch the demo and check out the website a bit more.

So since the Drobo recognizes your array as one volume, you can partition part of it for Time Machine? Or does Time Machine not care if it's on the same volume as something else?

As nice as the Drobo would be to use for iTunes, to have to buy something equally as large to back it up would be cost prohibitive.

You do not need to partition for Time Machine.

Really, as far as backing up goes, it depends on how anal you are. Some people like backups of the backups of their backups - if you know what I mean. I think drobo is enough to put me at ease.

 

[BrittQ]

Yeah I went back to watch the demo and check out the website a bit more.

So since the Drobo recognizes your array as one volume, you can partition part of it for Time Machine? Or does Time Machine not care if it's on the same volume as something else?

As nice as the Drobo would be to use for iTunes, to have to buy something equally as large to back it up would be cost prohibitive.

I don't have a Drobo (yet) but my understanding is:
You need to partition for Time Machine - so it doesn't fill up the entire space.

As long as only one drive fails in the Drobo, you just replace that drive and you still have all your data.

Only need to backup the entire Drobo if you don't want to take the chance of more than one drive failing at a time or want backup in case of fire/theft/flood.

I plan on getting a Drobo this weekend and putting 4x 2TB drives in it to use as my HTCP hard drive. (Store all my media).

I do not plan on getting another 8TB of space to back up the Drobo

 

[ascender]

The Drobo is a great device, but you still need to back it up as things can (and will) go wrong. So just bear that in mind when you're speccing up a system as your library can get very big, very quickly, especially when you start doing TV shows and movies.

Even with a Drobo or similar NAS, no matter what level of RAID you have, plan a backup strategy.

 

[srl7741]

I just purchased a LaCie 4Big 4TB RAID. Formatted it for RAID 5 for some redundancy. It connected to my iMac with FW800 and is substancially faster than the NAS. It's about a third full and should last for a while, but if need be I can connect up to four 4TB boxes together. I am very happy with my setup now.

That sounds like a pretty good idea. May I ask what the approximate cost was?
I need to come up with something to store all my media on one place and also keep it all backed up in another place. I would like to keep it simple if possible.

 

[ascender]

FWIW, I think the simplest setup for this sort of thing is to have a Mac with your library on it internally and then back this up to a Drobo externally. So buy a Mac Pro or old desktop Mac, chuck 4 HDDs in it and then buy a Drobo filled with enough disks to back up your server.

 

[uraniumwilly]

Simplicity:

Purchased the Sans Digital TR8M ($360)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816111071

Room for 8 drives and much expandibility.

Purchased the "Lycom 4 Port PCIe SATAII Host Card" from Mac gurus

Purchased two 1.5tb Seagate drives, leaving 6 bays open.

Slapped it together in no time. All runs well.

Lastly, FWIW, this thread has been a big help to me, in terms of understanding many issues. Thanks to all.

 

[Cuthbert]

Lastly, FWIW, this thread has been a big help to me, in terms of understanding many issues. Thanks to all.

Definitely. This is a great thread. It's helped me a lot as well. Can we get a sticky on this please?

 

[gregorybret]

My solution

That sounds like a pretty good idea. May I ask what the approximate cost was?
I need to come up with something to store all my media on one place and also keep it all backed up in another place. I would like to keep it simple if possible.

About $1000. Most home/workgroup RAID solutions are about the same. $400-$500 for the box and $100 and change for a TB drive. The part that sold me on this one is that it comes formatted for mac and is marketed to the mac users. I can format it using DiskUtility unlike my NAS which if it has any problems I cannot troubleshoot it on a mac.

 

[pjarvi]

Finally bit the bullet and bought ATV Flash to hack the AppleTV and add USB support. My current setup is now:

-iTunes library stored on 750GB external drive attached to MacBook
-500GB Time Capsule backing up MacBook and iTunes library that is on the external drive
-1TB external drive attached to AppleTV hacked with ATV Flash
-Entire iTunes library synced to AppleTV

With this setup, i'll run out of space on the Time Capsule before anywhere else.

 

[macrazee]

Well so far I have ~800GB of Movies, ~150GB of TV Shows, and about 25GB of Music.

That's a full 1TB gone... And I've really only began putting my DVD collection in!

Drobo seems to be the best solution; I have 2 units both 4TB (a little over 3TB actual space available on each) ... otherwise I also have a 2TB laCie laying around for additional storage.

Man this stuff eats space!

 

[macrazee]

WD launched its 2TB internal drive today. Toss four of those in a Drobo!

Thanks for the tip! Didn't notice they'd released them. A bit pricey at the moment (around $275) but they'll keep dropping...Not the best ratio considering I can buy Seagate 1.5TB for about $125 a pop (bare) but the reliability is questionable with Seagate these days.

 

[Mike Teezie]

Here is what I would like to do, but I lack the knowledge to know if it's possible.

I have an older, small Dell PC from my parents' office they let me have. The specs can be seen here. I would like this computer coupled with a 1.5TB external HD to serve content to my AppleTV, MacPro, and Macbook Pro (all are running Boxee). I would much rather have this small machine running all the time than my Mac Pro.

It will have a wired connection to my router. All I would have to do is install iTunes on to it, and leave it running all the time, right? I could send files from my Mac Pro to it over the network using SMB or whatever.

Is there any reason this wouldn't work?

 

[d21mike]

Here is what I would like to do, but I lack the knowledge to know if it's possible.

I have an older, small Dell PC from my parents' office they let me have. The specs can be seen here. I would like this computer coupled with a 1.5TB external HD to serve content to my AppleTV, MacPro, and Macbook Pro (all are running Boxee). I would much rather have this small machine running all the time than my Mac Pro.

It will have a wired connection to my router. All I would have to do is install iTunes on to it, and leave it running all the time, right? I could send files from my Mac Pro to it over the network using SMB or whatever.

Is there any reason this wouldn't work?

No. Should work fine.

 

[Mike Teezie]

No. Should work fine.

Man-tastic. Thanks for help!

I'm off to reformat this thing with XP Pro - so it will have nothing but that and iTunes on it. It skeeves me to know that at the core of all my Apple goodness will be a little Dell running Windows, but hey, whatever gets the job done.

 

[mmccaskill]

I want a Drobo over other devices simply because if you need to replace a drive you just do it. While it is rebuilding you still have access to the data. As far as I know, other devices don't do this. And I've heard the Drobo is stupid simple to use. Which is great for a married father with 2 kids (3 yr boy, 3 1/2 month boy).

 

[voodoofish]

I want a Drobo over other devices simply because if you need to replace a drive you just do it. While it is rebuilding you still have access to the data. As far as I know, other devices don't do this. And I've heard the Drobo is stupid simple to use. Which is great for a married father with 2 kids (3 yr boy, 3 1/2 month boy).

i have a drobo and i would recommend it. the only thing i would say is when you set it up it asks what size you want to format it to, and warns if you format it to the maximum (16TB) it might take 16mins to start up.... however, i haven't found this to be the case at all, at least on my iMac which it is connected to with FW800. A good reason for formatting it bigger than its actual capacity is that when you add more storage to the drobo, the volume you're already using can actually get bigger (up to the maximum you formatted the drive to, which at the moment you can only do up to 16TB) - whereas if you, say, formatted the drobo to 2TB and then added more space the new space would have to show up as an extra volume, meaning its as simple/seamless as it would otherwise be (part of the reason i got a drobo was to avoid the hassle of having separate external hard drives on separate volumes). the instructions don't make this that immediately obvious when you first get it though, so its something to bear in mind when you first start up your drobo and format it