How much storage for a home media center?
Some back story: Gray is building a digital media library to eventually replace (though the dvds will be around for back-up) his massive dvd collection. It’s been an interesting discussion involving hours of email, the addition of a Slingbox, and no shortage of web surfing for reviews.
So reading this article I start to wonder, what’s enough? Storage is cheaper, yes, but media files are growing, right?
Coraid on Wednesday introduced the EtherDrive SR2421 Storage Appliance. The rack-mountable storage system contains a hardware RAID controller and space for 24 Serial ATA (SATA) disks and costs $4,995 (without storage). [Note: there are cheaper alternatives out there]
The two dozen slots for drives can each accommodate a 1 terabyte (TB) drive mechanism, for a combined storage capacity of 24TB. It supports RAID levels 0, 1, 5 and 10, and can also be used as a JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks). The shelf is equipped with a universal power supply, and it’s shipped on standard cabinet-mount slide-out rails. It’s designed to fit in equipment cabinets with a depth of 28 to 33 inches
From: http://www.blu-ray.com/info/
“The format offers more than five times the storage capacity of traditional DVDs and can hold up to 25GB on a single-layer disc and 50GB on a dual-layer disc. This extra capacity combined with the use of advanced video and audio codecs will offer consumers an unprecedented HD experience. Recent development by Pioneer has pushed the storage capacity to 500GB on a single disc by using 20 layers.”
That leaves me with the possibility that an uncompressed dual-layer blu-ray disc collection is only 20 movies per 1 TB drive! Sure, that’s probably a bad place to start the estimate, considering most blu-ray flicks floating around in torrent land seem to be under 10 gigs, giving me at least 100 movies per drive. I might miss the occasional bonus track, the subtitles in dutch or hours of commentary, but in general I’d be able to watch what I want, when I want. At least until 1200p becomes a bit more common.
P.S. Looks like Slingbox will finally have some competition pushing 1080p video.
3 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
Leave a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Loading ...
Add one of these http://www.arucaelectronics.com/shop/productresources/9258%20Manual.pdf to chain together a bunch of external discs and flip on only what you need!
Gawd, I don’t wanna think about storing high-def video. Uff da. I think that’s a project for when petabyte drives are affordable. Of course, by then, we probably won’t be handling media with discs anymore, and, maybe, they’ll come up with some kick-ass codec that’ll make downloading HD content reasonable.
As for the SlingBox, I’m really not surprised it’s getting competition, since it’s such a great idea. AT&T’s Uverse fiber-optic TV/phone/internet service will let Windows users access their content via teh intarwebz, but for a monthly fee. The SlingBox can’t stream HD content, but for now, it still seems to be the best option, especially because it doesn’t have any usage fees and because, unlike the Matrixstream, it doesn’t require a decoding box on the receiving end, just a computer. But things are sure to get better!
Your efforts on my behalf are greatly appreciated, Charlie. This kind of thing is fun, especially when I’ve got an on-call tech expert holding my hand the whole way.
[...] georgia on my mindcharlie on 2012 olympics: let the genetically modified supermice compete!gray on How much storage for a home media center?charlie on How much storage for a home media center?charlie on McCain’s latest [...]