Anyone Using FreeNas +RAID as a Recordings Drive?

[bdgbill]

My GBPVR machine has been running flawlessly for over a year so I thought I would have a go at screwing it up.

My only real problem with my current system is drive space. I'm using a 500GB drive that is almost always full. I often travel for a weeks at a time plus I have a bad habit of hording shows (175 Simpsons last time I looked).

I have a bunch of old P3 and P4 systems lying around and should be able to put together a box thats overkill for FreeNas. I would like to buy another 500GB drive and combine it with my existing 500GB drive in a RAID (0?) array to appear as a 1TB drive to GBPVR. Is anyone doing anything like this?

I have no experience with RAID. Do I need a RAID controller card or will FReeNas combine the drives on it's own?

BTW - I realise that RAID 0 is somewhat risky and if either drive fails I will lose the data on both but I'm ok with that (they are just TV shows).

Thanks

[whurlston]

Have you considered using hardlinks? http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/ln/ln.html

[reven]

i just recently started using unraid, its very good, and more flexible than freenas. its only free for 3 drives, but its worth the $70 or so.

[gf404]

I used to have a similar problem. My solution was to record to the local drive, then at a scheduled time I run a job that moves all the nights recordings to a network drive and adjusts the GBPVR database to point to the new location.

This avoids recording accross the network which can cause problems if you are recording multiple shows at once. The network drive is a D-LINK DNS-323 running in RAID-0 (mainly for the speed of streaming multiple shows for playback).

[johnsonx42]

yes, freenas will combine drives on it's own. As a general rule, you want to give freenas individual drives to work with rather than trying to raid them together ahead of time. the exception to this would be if you're using a real HARDWARE raid controller.

as to whether it will work, I'd be nervous about trying to record over a network connection. I expect it won't be a problem as you're just doing SD with one capture device. For multiple HD streams, it might not be so great unless you use gigabit ethernet. I've never tried pointing gb-pvr to a network drive for recording; if it won't allow that you could configure freenas as an iSCSI target and use the microsoft iSCSI initiator to make it appear as a local device.

[johnsonx42]

oh, do be aware that freenas (and any other similar sort of software or hardware) will not use your existing ntfs drive formatted as-is with the files intact. you'll need to partition and format the drives. you probably know that, but it doesn't hurt to mention it.

[bdgbill]

Thanks for the info everyone.

Whurlston - Hardlinks appears to be over my head. My limited computer abilities stop at the command line.

Reven - I spent an hour or so looking through the UnRaid site. This is very interesting but it seems to be built for fault tolerence (RAID 4?) rather than just combining disks (RAID 0?). I may look at this for building a server to store the 300 Gigs of digital photos I am terrified of losing.

gf404 - This is a nice solution and may even work well with the FreeNas box if recording over the network is a problem. How are you managing editing the GBPVR database? Is it a batch file? I think there used to be a plugin that did something like this.

[-stattik-]

If all you want to do is add one drive to your existing drive, FreeNAS seems a bit like overkill. Just add the drive to your existing PC and use the disk administrator to span the drives. Here's some instructions.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308424

[bdgbill]

Yeah, this is where I started a while ago. Disk spanning is only available on XP Pro. My GBPVR box runs XP Home.

[gf404]

gf404 - This is a nice solution and may even work well with the FreeNas box if recording over the network is a problem. How are you managing editing the GBPVR database? Is it a batch file? I think there used to be a plugin that did something like this.

I basically use SimpleArchiver. It was set up a while ago and I think I re-wrote some of the batch files used to call it. I have not touched it for about 6 months now and it "just works".

I record to DVR-MS and the only processing I do is comskip.
PostProcess.bat basically creates a text file that is a list of recordings to be moved. Schedules task runs a batch file that reads the que and calls the archiver to relocate the files and udjust database to point to new location.

http://gbpvr.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Utili...leArchiver

I can send a copy of my current batch files if it will help out.