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Greetings! I am fairly new to this and have been doing a lot of reading lately on this subject. I am about to take the plunge.

I love the guide and will be making my media server based on the guide. I have a couple questions..

I am wanting the server to remain in my office, and my entire house linked to it so I can view anything on the server anywhere in the house. Via, wifi, or wired, etc.
I have roughly 150 blurays and another 300ish regular dvds and a few gigs of audio. Just how much hard drive space am I looking at to put everything on the server... I know its going to take a long time to rip everything to it, but adventually it will all be on the server. Would it be best to just get a smaller drive, 50gig or so for the OS, then seperate drives, or an external drive bay with multiple drives to hold all the data?
I am a noob when it comes to RAID. if a drive fails with a TD of movies on it, I do not want to spend all the man hours again ripping/burning stuff to it. So I would an option to be able to swap an old drive for a new one and place all the content back on it?

How feasible is it to stream hi def content wirelessly? I plan on having everything wired, but just currious.

Thanks!

Hello there and welcome to the forums

If you've not ripped any blu-rays or DVDs, or indeed music yet then the question as to how much disk space they will take depends on how you intend ripping them.
If we take ripping to the two extremes: a 1:1 rip which is an exact duplication of the original disc. For Blu-ray discs you're looking at ~50GB per disk and for DVDs you're looking at ~8GB per disc. These are just rough numbers but good ball-park figures. So, to rip your collection using this method you'd be looking at needing 10TB. Plus of course adding some sort of RAID "protection" would require probably another 2-4TB.
If you want them to take up less space than that you can either remove extraneous content (languages, audio tracks, menus etc) and/or compress them down (re-encode them). So, you could be looking at a few GB for each movie. Obviously if you take this approach to ripping them and later decide you want the extra content and/or the bits you stripped out then you'll need to re-rip.

RAID is a big topic and one with many differing opinions (I've seen some very heated debates on the subject of RAID ) There really is no one-size-fits-all strategy but for me, FlexRAID fitted my needs perfectly. One of the big plus points was I could "install" it on top of my existing data. With most RAID solutions you have to start with empty drives and then put the data on afterwards. With FlexRAID you don't.

The idea of RAID is that if you have a drive failure (and the exact number of concurrent drive failures it can cope with depends on the RAID solution you've implemented) then you replace the failed drive and use the remaining drives to re-create the data on the new drive. Obviously whilst this is happening your server will take a performance hit but there is very little in the way of man hours. More machine hours.
You should have a good read up on the pros and cons of the various RAID solutions out there before you take the plunge. For example, say you implement a typical RAID 5 solution and experience two simulataneous drive failures then you'd lose ALL data on ALL RAIDed drives. So, don't think of RAID as being a fool-proof backup solution, it's not.

Your question of installing the OS on a smaller drive and/or using external drive bays is another big topic. On mine I've got a 50GB partition on a 2TB drive and the rest of the drive (1950GB) is included in my RAID array. If you go with external then that may limit your choice of RAID solution. Again, you should read up before you take the plunge. When I've filled up my internal drives I intend buying a DAS. However, I hope that 4TB drives become affordable before that day comes. Time will tell

Onto your last question, that's a tricky one and depends on your environment. Some people report great success with wireless but others have little success. You might want to consider homeplugs (ethernet over your mains wiring). The ideal solution for most people is fully wired. Have a read of my little guide.

Is the above of any help?

Ian.

Ian,

You post is helpful. I will look into the FlexRAID option and read up on some pros and cons. My house is wired already and I am about to convert the rest of the phone plugs into cat5 plugs, so that should take care of all the house.
I've never used LINUX, so I am just hesitant. I will be buying a new system for the server, and want to make it a headless unit and be sure it can operate w/o heating issues, etc. Again, my goal is to have the entire house automated for video, audio. Ideally I would love to be able to operate my TV in any room with an iPad. For instance, if I have my ipad, I'd like to be able to operate my outdoor patio TV and select anything from the server to watch/listen too. If I then go upstairs, or living room with the same iPad I'd like to control those devices as well, etc. I have a dream and a vision, just need to start somewhere, and I think the first step is getting the server built and populated with the data I want on it.

Thanks!

Hi,

I'm very interested in your plans and being the nosey chap that I am I'm very intrigued how you hope to achieve them. What mechanism will you use to control the TVs using your ipad? You'll need a "client" at each TV so what will that be? And what will run on the ipad?

Re your telephone wiring, how many individual wires do you have inside the telephone cable currently? 2 or more?

Sorry for the questions sir, I know you hoped to get your questions answered here so I apologise for firing some back at you

Ian.