Necessary hard drive connection speed for movies...

[Flinkly]

ok, so i'm getting another hard drive to archive my dvd's on and was wondering what speed i need to get (connection) in order to play my dvd's at top speed, or does it matter?

i'm looking at getting a 300 GB disk and don't want to have to update it within the next 5-10 years, if anything, i'd like to buy more like it to increase my capacity.  i already have a raptor 74 GB hard drive which is sata, but should i get my other drives for sata?

my computer only has two sata connections at the moment, so how do i upgrade that?

sata would give me easier raid ability with intel, but i hear you can raid the regular connection too.  should i just get sata since it's the best connection out and hope it stays on the frontlines for a  while?

thanks for the help guys, i haven't kept up on computer stuff since i built my last computer...

[boykster]

Either SATA or plain old PATA (ide) is fine for movies.  In fact, I play movies across my network, and 100base ethernet is a LOT slower than a hard drive, and I have no issues.

i'm looking at getting a 300 GB disk and don't want to have to update it within the next 5-10 years

don't count on this....5-10 YEARS before you update your drive? 

Just buy a decent sized drive that you're comfortable with price-wise.  300gigs won't buy you a lot of movie space, depending on how you store them.  I store uncompressed (main movie only) dvd's on a couple of linux servers with RAID5 arrays -> about 5 Terabytes of storage and I currently have about 450 movies (and 120 or so tv episodes) with space for maybe 200 more movies....

 

[shmokes]

Man, I wish I could afford a setup like that.  I've got a couple 400 GB drives striped in a RAID0 array.  They're nearly full and compress all my movies and tv shows into divx files.  I rip movies and send them back to Netflix, so I've got about 25 movies and loads of TV content I haven't seen yet.  I figure once I'm in law school and living solely on my wife's income we'll be super poor and it'll be nice to have all this content archived then.  But my fear is that one of my disks will fail and I'll end up losing tons of stuff I haven't even seen yet.

I'd love 5 terrabytes and I'd love some RAID5 action.

[NiN^_^NiN]

Im sad to say i recently got a 250gb hdd after having a 60gb and 40gb and its full and i only got it 2 months ago

Im gonna be getting the biggest hdd i can find soon last time i checked 650gb was what i saw

[AtomSmasher]

don't count on this....5-10 YEARS before you update your drive? 

I still use a 4 gig drive that I bought in 1998 in one of my computers   

[boykster]

don't count on this....5-10 YEARS before you update your drive? 

I still use a 4 gig drive that I bought in 1998 in one of my computers   

Is that your primary pc?  I didn't mean to say that the drive will be un-usable in 5-10 years, but rather that it won't be your primary storage drive in that many years.

Shmokes:

For most usage, a couple of big drives striped will be just fine, but yeah, if you lose a drive, you may be screwed.  I had a software RAID5 (linux) go south on me a few years ago and I lost a bunch of movies 

It is nice having so much storage available, and I can have a couple of HTPC's routed throughout the house to have movies available "on demand" at all times.....

[Flinkly]

my 74 gig has held me till i started archiving movies.  after 6 movies, i've only got 10 gigs left.  i do have some roms on there too though, takin up space.

as for old hdd's, i still have my original 160 gb drive from 2000.  that's about 6 years...and i'll use it till it dies, which will be a while since it's in the arcade.

i guess i'll just get the better deal and look for the best gig per dollar...