Question About Raid

[Horrorj616]

So I'm attempting to upgrade my mess of external drives connected via a hub to my BB. I was considering something like the Mediasonic ProRaid 8 bay unit found here: http://ain.mediasonic.ca/store/produ...tu3q3gnp96bar4

I am not really interested in accessing anything over my network as my router is pretty old and I'm sure I would need to upgrade that to stream full hd high bitrate stuff. My question is would this work at all with the BB in anything other then JBOD mode?

[Lee_Machine]

So I'm attempting to upgrade my mess of external drives connected via a hub to my BB. I was considering something like the Mediasonic ProRaid 8 bay unit found here: http://ain.mediasonic.ca/store/produ...tu3q3gnp96bar4

I am not really interested in accessing anything over my network as my router is pretty old and I'm sure I would need to upgrade that to stream full hd high bitrate stuff. My question is would this work at all with the BB in anything other then JBOD mode?

Since the BBox is USB2 you won't get the speeds advertised of USB3, but USB3 is backwards compatible. BBox does not support eSATA.

The MediaSonic device will do all the software RAID conversion for you and and transport the data over USB. So yes, this will work. When vendors put supporting OS they only put what they tested the device on and will officially support, not what devices will work. Since the BBox is running Linux then USB2 will work (USB3 if the BBox had one)

You can use the BBox itself as a media server. I have mine running SMB (SAMBA) and I can access on the content that is on the BBox from any computing devices that supports Samba, to include my Android tablet.

[Horrorj616]

Thanks for the help!

What if I'm running say 15tb in a raid array, will the BB be limited by the 2tb max for an external drive? seeing as how the raid box would show up as one massive drive...Sorry for bugging but I Have never really used raid.

[Umpa]

If your in the market for a 15TB raid you should go the nas route. Your talking serious money at 15TB (trust me i know) you can stream all HD content on 100mbit connection. Mine is Gigabit all the way but the BBox is not so as far as thats concerned its a 100mbit network.

[aaronwt]

If your in the market for a 15TB raid you should go the nas route. Your talking serious money at 15TB (trust me i know) you can stream all HD content on 100mbit connection. Mine is Gigabit all the way but the BBox is not so as far as thats concerned its a 100mbit network.

15TB is still relatively cheap. it doesn't take much to setup an unRAID box, and even with the current inflated hard drive prices, it's still costs around one quarter the price to setup 15TB of storage on a network now, than it did when I setup 3TB of storage on my network in 2002/2003.

[Umpa]

Well there are several ways to do it, but 3TB drives are £150 each. Sure the real cost of storage has come down but so does everything. 15TB is still expensive no matter how you try and justify it & the enclosure aloan was $399. The point i was making is that for a few quid more you can buy a nas enclosure which will work. If he has that kind of money best to go nas. Even if he is using old 2TB drives its best to go 4 bay qnap route and have 8TB stripe 0.

[cayars]

Also I bet your movie library is a whole lot bigger now then it was in 2003/2004 requiring more storage space then it previously did.

Example I watch Two and a Half men on occasion but my dad watches it. So I have 9 season online. Same with all West Wing and a few other "old" shows.

My point being that what we probably store today is a lot greater then we did 10 years ago regardless of cost. I used to record, watch and delete shows where now I just tend to never delete them.

[aaronwt]

Also I bet your movie library is a whole lot bigger now then it was in 2003/2004 requiring more storage space then it previously did.

Example I watch Two and a Half men on occasion but my dad watches it. So I have 9 season online. Same with all West Wing and a few other "old" shows.

My point being that what we probably store today is a lot greater then we did 10 years ago regardless of cost. I used to record, watch and delete shows where now I just tend to never delete them.

Yes, I have over one hundred terabytes of storage on my network now. Although I don't keep as much HDTV recordings like I did ten years ago. The bulk of that 3TB was used to store my HDTV Recordings. But now most of my storage is from Blu-ray Discs.

[Horrorj616]

Thanks For the responses!

The 15tb number is more of a later on down the line number. I'll be utilizing existing drives and 1 or maybe 2 3tb drives to start out with. My only major issue with going the NAS route is this (try not to laugh too much): I don't have an always on network. I currently live in an extremely hot (in the summer) climate, and when you have routers + tv + BB + external drives. It can get pretty hot. So a lot of times I have the network stuff off unless I need it. I have been looking into the cheapest way of building my own unraid box, which is to just build it yourself. If I'm going to go through the trouble of doing that I may just get rid of the BB and build a semi decent powered HTPC with a bunch of internal storage.

[Umpa]

All you need is a nas and a router, regardless of where you live it should not have an impact on temperature.

Also if your going to add drives a few at a time then JBOD is the only way to go. For you people not in the know that stands for Just A Bunch Of Drives.