[ILUG] Thoughts on a digital media server...

[Glen Gray]

Now I've got my xbox modded (thanks greg/nige) and I'm starting to copy
content onto it, I got to thinking about long term archiving of my
media.

The reason for the xbox mod was to turn it into a media center for the
sitting room and to remove DVD/Audio discs from reach of my 2 year old
son. Over the weekend I began to realize how powerful this delivery
system would be for someone like me. Just to test it out, I setup a
samba share to the /media dir on my desktop. Plugged the xbox into the
composite in on my TV card and configured the xbox media center software
to access the SMB share, and also into the lan via the ethernet socket.

It worked perfectly. The plan all along was to have bigger disk storage
on the desktop that would be network accessible, via WiFi in the sitting
room. I stuck a 120GB disk in the xbox, but I can see myself running out
of space on that sooner rather than later. So I started thinking about
what I might to do over the next year or so as that 120GB fills up with
content that I don't really want to have to delete. 

Off to Komplett and I basically decided that I'd spec out a 4 port S-ATA
RAID card. I'd be adding this to my server. Not a real server but a old
Gateway PC with Debian Woody that does DHCP/DNS/NIS/NFS for my HAN (home
area...). For archival security you'd want mirroring. For large capacity
you'd want stripping, so with 4 disks and RAID0+1 you get the best of
both worlds. As I understand it, you RAID0 two drives and then mirror
that RAID0 strip set to two other drives. 

Based on current Komplett prices you could have 500GB of storage,
mirrored for just €1,049. That's approx €2 per mirrored GB of data. If
you where reckless with your data you could have 1000GB in RAID0, but I
wouldn't trust that. Obviously I'd have to perform some surgery on the
case to ensure sufficient air flow, but the drives would be idle most
time anyway.

Interesting anyway. I'm sure it's an area that more and more of us will
be getting into as time goes on. I'm sure I well be able to get better
storage per euro by the time I actually get around to
needing/affording/justifying/being allowed to do this.
-- 
Glen Gray <glen at lincor.com>                             17 Dame Court
Senior Software Engineer                            Dublin 2, Ireland
Lincor Solutions Ltd.                          Ph: +353 (0) 1 6746413