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#1
Hiya Guys

Just a quick question...

I currently have a 4Tb Buffalo Linkstation but have ordered a HP Microserver and 3x 3Tb Hdd's. Now after recently losing 3Tb of Blu-ray rips due to a failed drive what would be the best solution of setting up the server? ie. Raid etc.. Really don't like the idea of ripping everything (again!)

Everyone will say backups but not keen on having loads of portables drives lying around. If it helps it will only be used to store and stream media to XBMC and the other half's tablet.

All suggestions will be taken on-board

Thanks in advance
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#2
Take a look at unRAID. I've got an install on an HP Proliant Microserver. It allows you to have a parity drive (which means you can rebuild your data from a single drive failure), and unlike most RAID solutions, if you lose more than one drive, the drives are still readable individually outside the array. It also only spins up drives when they're needed - so if you're watching a movie and have your set-up configured correctly, you only have one drive spinning during replay.

It works well for me. You can add drives pretty easily without having to rebuild the array, and you can have drives of different sizes in the array (I had a mix of 1TB and 2TB drives for quite a while - though the parity drive has to be as large as the largest data drive). It also offers user shares. This allows you to mount content spread across multiple drives as a single network share. So I have a folder called Movies on every drive, and a folder called TV on every drive. Then I mount a user share called Movies and a user share called TV on my network clients (like XBMC). These user shares then appear to contain everything in all the Movie or TV folders on all my drives - I don't need to know which drive something is on, or mount multiple drives separately. Really neat. You can define at what folder level the spreading across drives takes place as well - so you can ensure all of the files for a particular movie remain on a single drive for instance.

The Parity drive offers some redundancy - but as everyone, boringly says, it's not a replacement for a backup.

I use my servers to store media I have in other forms (either original CD, DVD or Blu-ray) or I can afford to lose (Recorded TV)

Stuff that's more precious (photos etc.) I store separately (and backup to the cloud)
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#3
Thanks Noggin, May take a closer look at unRAID at of people seem to favour it over WHS
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#4
^^^ +1 to what noggin said
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#5
The great thing about unRAID is that it is purely designed to do one thing well. You can run additional apps on the box as well should you wish - but the core functionality is what it is designed for. It's a server. That's what it does. There's a strong support community around it, and although it does cost money, it's not hugely expensive, and there is a cut-down free version you can use to trial.

If you DO go down the unRAID route make sure you research supported hardware - that seems to be the key to a painfree set-up. I've got two unRAID servers at the moment - and have built three in total. One is an HP Proliant Microserver (the cashback deal in the UK meant it was stupidly cheap) the other two were my original home build and its replacement. The two home builds were both a doddle to set-up as I used supported hardware in both cases.

I haven't used WHS - though I know people who do and who like it. I think since they ditched drive extender (which does something similar to user shares) it was less popular - and AIUI Microsoft are not continuing with the product after the current release?
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