How big of a hard drive is required

I`m putting together a media pc in the hopes of loading up xbmc. As these are generally shipped barebones i`m curious how big of a hard drive i should be buying. KEEPING IN MIND i have a media collection of over 7000 movies. I have an unused 60gig ssd drive that i was hoping to use but i`m not sure if that would be sufficient for the xbmc os and the scrapped info and cover art. Or is the cover art and info stored on the server end and not on the Operating System hard drive. HELP!

this depends, if the movies are untouched/uncompressed or not.
I have now around now 900 movie files; mix between SD and HD material 60/40.
For that I have 4x 3TB = 12TB drive space.
I guess I have already in use 80% of total space.

In my case, the help files of XBMC like pictures, covers and so on are included
on the HTPC XBMC database. For that it's not so much space required.

All the media is stored on a server, its more just the cover art / fan art / plot / actor (scrape data and photos) that I need to store on the operating system hard drive along with the database.

That depends on what OS you're using. 60GB should be fine even for Windows 7, but Windows 7 could take up to like 40GB on it's own once updated and all that.

However for any other OS, 60GB is mooooooooooooore than enough.

Just to put things in perspective, I have about 1100 movies and 3800 tv episodes and my Thumbnail directory is under 800meg. A 60GB SSD drive is more than enough for running XBMC on linux or windows if the machine is specifically used for XBMC.

7000 movies, i am sorry but what type of movie are those, imdb doesnt even contain that much...

on my hand, i have 820+ 1080p movies which take 7.2TB and 4000 episodes which take 3.8TB

(2012-06-12 20:50)wil32 Wrote:  7000 movies, i am sorry but what type of movie are those, imdb doesnt even contain that much...

http://www.imdb.com/stats

imdb lists 270 000 feature films.

(2012-06-12 20:50)wil32 Wrote:  7000 movies, i am sorry but what type of movie are those, imdb doesnt even contain that much...

on my hand, i have 820+ 1080p movies which take 7.2TB and 4000 episodes which take 3.8TB

The OP is referring to the storage space to hold the library database with metadata and artwork, not the space to store the media itself.

I am running OpenELEC (http://www.openelec.tv) on a 60GB SSD and I have barely used a few percent of the disk... Note: All of the thumbnails, fanart, etc are on the SSD and media, etc are on my NAS...

(2012-06-12 15:50)ViCtuM Wrote:  I`m putting together a media pc in the hopes of loading up xbmc. As these are generally shipped barebones i`m curious how big of a hard drive i should be buying. KEEPING IN MIND i have a media collection of over 7000 movies. I have an unused 60gig ssd drive that i was hoping to use but i`m not sure if that would be sufficient for the xbmc os and the scrapped info and cover art. Or is the cover art and info stored on the server end and not on the Operating System hard drive. HELP!

I have 5 XBMC's: 4 on Win7 64 bit Enterprise, one on a iPad Gen 1

I find that on the WIN7 boxes, a 60 GB drive is sufficient for XBMC.

Checking my current install (win764 on an OCZ SSD), it looks like my drive says that it is a total of 55.7 GB, with 29.1 GB used, and still 26.6 GB available.


Of course, I also built a Win7 server with 18TB of drives running MySQL to store my media as well as a centralized DB for all the thumbs and cover art.

Still even if you don't implement MySQL, you would still have room to spare for thumbs and cover art.


Hell, with SSD prices dropping, I just picked up another 64GB SSD for 41.00 ... so not only is it big enough, it could even be super-fast enough.


Disclaimer: As with all things, your milage may vary.

v.