First time poster, long time lurker.... WAY TOO VERBOSE I know. And I admit the 112TB in the title is not what I am going to have initially but the server I end up with should be capable of 112TB usable.
The adjective noob does not even begin to describe what I am when it comes to anything related to actually building a computer/server. I have the "general" gist of what is involved, needed, etc. My goal is to serve all of my media (BD rips, HDDVD rips, DVD rips as well as home movies and family pics) to all of the TVs in my home. Most likely, not counting the dedicated home theater room, I would need capability of transcoding to four devices but that would be an extreme case. This is going to be Plex based. I downloaded Plex and played around with it on my editing workstation and was able to successfully stream content from a USB drive to a smart TV and a couple of Roku boxes with Plex apps so I like the interface and ease of use. I am not sure how I will be handling media playback in my dedicated home theater room. Building a server has been a top priority but a health scare derailed me. Currently, I have 14 1.5TB Western Digital green drives and 7 3TB Western Digital green drives that are backups of the 1.5 drives. I use a Plugable USB dock connected to a DUNE Smart D1 media player and am able to feed 1080/23.976 to my processor, projector etc. There is a Plex app for DUNE called EmPlexer but I have no experience with it so can't speak to it's reliability. Ideally, I would like content passed unmolested to my Lumagen Processor which does an excellent job of deinterlacing and scaling SD content. I was going to order a system from Lime Technology but I am confident I can DIY this and for less investment (might be wrong on BOTH counts). Aside from the DUNE as a Plex client, the only other option for the home theater is a new HTPC or. and this is totally above my comprehension, XBMC running on the actual server with virtualization whereby the server would spit out all media over HDMI. I don't care how I get the video onto the screen as long as my HD content is pure 1080/23.976 (or 24p or 30p depending on what the file contains) and I have support for all of the lossless audio codecs.
I have ordered a Rosewill RSV-L4500 case and if it ends up being filled with 8TB drives, I would have 112TB of usable storage. Obviously I'm not starting that way. I have no idea what I am getting in the way of Mobo, video card, cache drive, etc... You know the stuff that actually MAKES it a server. But, I was planning on an 8TB or at the very minimum a 6TB drive for parity then use the 7 3TB drives I have to start with. I would populate the rest of the server with 4 or 6TB drives as needed. 4TB are just the most cost effection option at this time it seems. If I take all the media that is ripped so far (my entire HDDVD collection, majority of my BD collection) we are almost at 21TB. I still have about 400 blu rays to rip and I do not reencode because I am watching this material on a sixteen foot wide 2.35 aspect ratio screen. I am also ripping any DVDs that have not been replaced with blu ray, and some that I don't care about as much. My rough math, estimating each BD at 30 gigs on average and each DVD at 5 gigs on average I am going to need to be at around 40TB here and now. Then I need to account for growth. I am going to update this thread as my build progresses, including pics of all of my triumphs and failures but in the mean time, (and yes I am using the search feature religiously) if any of you have any thoughts or suggestions, by all means chime in. I will also edit as I decide on components. The thing I am most curious about is how I should handle my home theater. Thanks all.
CASE: Rosewill RSV-L4500 OR Norco 4220
HDDs: 7x 3TB Western Digital green drives to begin with