Need help with a Storage solution

[FPV MIC]

Last night my 10 TB external hard drive decided to give up on me so I need to find a way to store large amounts of files in a better way. I didn't lose anything as I have two 8 TB HD's as a back up in my home office and the one that failed was in my bar and used for playing music from (HD concerts, DVD files, mp3's etc.).

As you can see I have very large storage needs, but I have very little knowledge on how would be the best way to back up and possibly stream all of my music (15 TB's at this stage... but I'm waiting for several more DVD's & Blu-rays to arrive) to my bar.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated as I fear if one of my office HD's go down I stand to lose just under 8 TB's of concerts

 

[sesselpupser]

Depends on your budget, but a RAID 5 array or Drobo (or other proprietary RAID scheme) is probably what you want. Not sure about using them as streaming servers as I only have experience with Drobo DAS drives, but depending on how much you want to spend it's a good way to get a large amount of storage, redundancy, expandability (again, if you want to pay for it) and they also alert you when a drive has failed so you can hot swap a dead drive out with no loss of data.

At work we use Drobo 5c DAS enclosures to store working backups of video projects (the proper backups we have are too slow to work from because, of course, storing hours and hours of 4K ProRes video requires a lot of space). They are quite slow for bulk transfers, but for streaming media I'm sure they'd be good enough. As for how you'd stream stuff, I'm not really sure as it's been over a decade since I did it and it didn't work very well, but you can get some DAS drives with built-in media server software and the Raspberry Pi 4 would also be good for that kind of application as it's got gigabit Ethernet and USB 3.0.

 

[FPV MIC]

Depends on your budget, but a RAID 5 array or Drobo (or other proprietary RAID scheme) is probably what you want. Not sure about using them as streaming servers as I only have experience with Drobo DAS drives, but depending on how much you want to spend it's a good way to get a large amount of storage, redundancy, expandability (again, if you want to pay for it) and they also alert you when a drive has failed so you can hot swap a dead drive out with no loss of data.

At work we use Drobo 5c DAS enclosures to store working backups of video projects (the proper backups we have are too slow to work from because, of course, storing hours and hours of 4K ProRes video requires a lot of space). They are quite slow for bulk transfers, but for streaming media I'm sure they'd be good enough. As for how you'd stream stuff, I'm not really sure as it's been over a decade since I did it and it didn't work very well, but you can get some DAS drives with built-in media server software and the Raspberry Pi 4 would also be good for that kind of application as it's got gigabit Ethernet and USB 3.0.

Thanks for the reply .

I did quite a bit of research yesterday and came up with something that I think is similar to what you're describing (but I really am clueless when it comes to IT) but it's a NAS system. I have no idea what the difference is between NAS and DAS or which one is the best way to go for my circumstances . This is it https://www.mwave.com.au/product/synology-ds1618-6-bay-nas-6x-wd-wd60efax-6tb-red-nas-hdd-ac22852 but I really don't know if it would work suitably, or if it's even a decent brand, as much of what I'd be sending is large 4K blu-ray files (anywhere from 12- 45gbs).

It doesn't help that prices have gone through the roof right now but I really have no choice but to spend whatever it takes to get this up and running again because my bar is one of the most used areas of my home (not just for alcoholic beverages) and I have no other way to play all of my concerts. Unfortunately I can't get to the blu-ray players or discs in either my lounge or bar because there's no wheelchair access to the areas they're in, but luckily I can still access the lower section of my bar and operate everything by keyboard (once my lovely wife boots up the laptop for me).

Ideally I'd like to have all my music in one central location and then be able to send it to my lounge room and my bar from my home office. ATM I have a Nvidia Shield with a 4TB Hard drive plugged into it in the lounge room, PC with 2x 8TB external hard drives (office), and a laptop that had a 10TB, 4TB and sometimes a 2TB hard drives plugged into it all at once (bar). As you can see this is probably far from ideal and leaves myself open to failures (the 10 TB hard drive was only 6 months old).

Edit: I just had a thought, I'm not even sure if my PC is powerful enough. it does have a blu-ray drive and blu-rays are noticeably clearer when played and paused than DVD's.

My PC specs . It's about nine years old and can runs windows 10 easily.

 

[Rallywagon]

I don't know your full needs, but if you are looking to stream music from it, then your best bet is likely to use a proper server, stuff it full of hard drives and run something like FreeNAS for file management and LinuxMCE to control your media.
You can buy Dell PowerEdge tower server for fairly cheap, toss in some hard drives, pick your poison of RAID (I suggest RAID 5) set up a small SSD or even usb flash drives to run FreeNAS and you choice of Kodi or XMC and you will be good to go. Whats nice about RAID 5. If a single disc fails, you don't loss data and your system keeps running. Replace the old drive with an equal new one and the data will auto populate back onto the disk. Very nice. You do need 3 of the same exact HDD or SSDs though. 4 is recommended.

 

[FPV MIC]

I don't know your full needs, but if you are looking to stream music from it, then your best bet is likely to use a proper server, stuff it full of hard drives and run something like FreeNAS for file management and LinuxMCE to control your media.
You can buy Dell PowerEdge tower server for fairly cheap, toss in some hard drives, pick your poison of RAID (I suggest RAID 5) set up a small SSD or even usb flash drives to run FreeNAS and you choice of Kodi or XMC and you will be good to go. Whats nice about RAID 5. If a single disc fails, you don't loss data and your system keeps running. Replace the old drive with an equal new one and the data will auto populate back onto the disk. Very nice. You do need 3 of the same exact HDD or SSDs though. 4 is recommended.

Thanks for the reply .

I'm not really confident in putting something together myself as I really am a noob when it comes to PC's and storage solutions. What would be the benefits of doing this over something like the pre-made NAS I linked in post #3?

The main use would be storage that is accessible at multiple points in my home (lounge room, bar, and home office) just to streamline and safe guard everything rather than having individual external hard drives plugged in all over the place. I did look as NAS with Plex as a solution but from what I've read Plex doesn't run some of the different types of files for my particular needs (BDMV & VIDEO_TS) and I really don't want to go through everything again and put it into something like MKV format.

It really doesn't need to be anything other than storage, because I already have methods of utilising the media that would be stored on the yet do be decided unit in all the separate rooms (NVIDIA Shield, PC and Laptop), and I already have programs that run my files on every unit so it will mean I won't have any issues with formats. Hopefully it won't be too hard to link everything up . I still haven't delved too deeply into that yet.

I like to have a crack at things like this but I'm so confused about all the different NAS units and solutions to what I thought would be a fairly simple issue that I might just end up paying someone to come in and set everything up for me. It would cost a lot more in dollars, but I'm starting to think it will be easier in the long run.