Hard Drive Set up and Movie Storage

[drchris33]

Hello Forum.....

I am a newbie as well. I have about 2600 movies in my collection, all on my computer on various internal and external hard drives. My goal is to have a mainstreamed center to stream all my movies from one hub inside one box. So I built a new box. I have 8 GB RAM and five hard drives.......4 of them are 3 TBs each for my movie storage and I have one SSD for my OS. I have installed Freenas and have most of it set up (thanks to multiple videos and step-by-step guides from the net). I have added all the volumes. I am a Windows guy, so I had set up a CIFS to share my drives. I also have multliple WDTV Live boxes in my home (home is large, about 7600 sq/foot). So I want to be able to stream my movies throughout my home.

My question is when I am creating a CIFS, do I create four separate ones, one for each of my hard drives? I have named them A-D. Or can I set up one CIFS windows share, naming the path mnt/A/B/C/D? I had initially made four separate shares and began transferring some of my movies over the network but then was wondering if I would be creating four copies of each movie; one on each hard drive.

All of the forums have been very helpful thus far but I haven't been able to find much on this. Sorry if it's a stupid question and sorry if it had already been addressed.

Also, I do like the XBMC format and idea and I know that you wouldn't put it on the same box, but I kind of want a ***y looking menu and such so that I can fetch my movies, instead of the boring WDTV screen by selecting videos and then scrolling through the hundreds of pages to find the movie that I want.

Any input would be very helpful and appreciated. Thank you!!!

 

[joeschmuck]

Well a few questions...
How did you setup your drives? Did you use a RAIDZ1 for the four 3TB drives? I would recommend that if you didn't. This will create a single large pool of storage. If you wanted to keep your movies seperate form other data I recommend creating a single dataset for now, call it "Media" or "Movies", whatever you like. Do not set a quota. Enable CIFS if you haven't already. Next create a Windows share and once done you should be able to see it over your network (assuming you setup your network configuration already).

At this point you can start copying file to you FreeNAS shares. I would only do a few and then test it out by watching them on you TVs.

So you do not need to create multiple copies of your files, just the one. With a RAIDZ1 you can have a single drive failure and still retain your data but you end up with ~9TB of storage vice 12TB with your configuration. 2600 movies is a lot, good luck!

 

[drchris33]

Thank you for the reply. I didn't set up as a RAID. In this box, all it is, is a server. I will not have any other data on it. I guess my question is when I create a CIFS share, it asks for a path. Do I make one path with A/B/C/D or do I make four separate paths with each letter. My network is all set up. When I had started copying over some of the movies for a test run, I could view them on my TV via WDTV box. CIFS is enabled. So I guess the only thing I don't know how and what to do is making a windows share. And then when I was transferring files over, I didn't know which hard drive it was going to. On my old computer I had the drives labeled (eg A-G, H-M, etc). But if I can pool all the drives together to make one large store, I guess that it what I want. I just want to be able to turn on my TV and WDTV, select a movie and watch it. I am also debating on building an HTPC so I can run everything through that and stream the movies through my server.

Sorry for being a retard, I just want to get this right. It is like the fourth time I have installed FreeNas. I had tried just Windows 7 as well, but I think FreeNas is what I want and need. Thanks again!!

 

[cyberjock]

I have a friend that uses FreeNAS to store his movie collection and watch it from a WDTV box.

Your best bet is to setup a RAIDZ1 like joeschmuck said. Then do a single file share called "media" or "movies" or something. Then from the WDTV box simply access the share and you will have a nice list of everything all in one place.

if you setup separate shares as you are currently trying to do you will have to go to separate shares to watch different movies. So why not keep it simple and put it all in one place? Not to mention if you use RAIDZ1 you can handle a single disk failure without a loss of data.

 

[joeschmuck]

If you want to separate movies alphabetically that is easy, just create a directory for it like you would any Windoze machine. Since you have so many movies you could create 27 groups, A-Z and 0 (zero for numbers). Trust us, create the single larger RAIDZ1 to start with, create your data structure (directories), and then copy a few movies into it. Share them and test to make sure you are happy with it, then copy your remaining movies to the NAS.

Also, when you test, you should test your FreeNAS box using all the WDTV boxes at once if that is the use you actually expect to happen in your house. What you are testing here is if your computer setup can handle the bandwidth and I/O needed to support all those streams. If it doesn't work you might consider doing a RAID with the drives formatted in UFS vice ZFS. This greatly reduces the overhead on your FreeNAS CPU. Whatever you do, do not start coping all 2600 movies to your NAS before testing it. You will kick yourself in the rear if it fall short of your expectations and you have to redo something.

 

[noee]

I have similar needs regarding movies and music (thousands of files, MKV and APE) but I took a different approach with FreeNAS as the repository. I use jRiver Media Center for playback on all my machines (so far) and as a DLNA server to the "outside" world when needed.

I set up 3 HDs in the FreeNAS server as simple drives with UFS. I then have a movie share and music share (CIFS) on each drive (like Movies1/Music1, etc.). The data rarely if ever changes once on the disk, though there are occasional deletes and of course, additions to the collections. I then use SNAPRaid as my "backup" solution since the data is essentially static.

Then, my jRiver MC auto imports are just set for each share. I have one jRiver instance that acts as a DLNA server for devices that can use that avenue.

This keeps the admin of my FreeNAS box simple. It's fast and lightweight (no ZFS) on the hardware and I can easily keep everything backed up with SNAPRaid to external disks (parity).

FWIW.