The Official PC building thread -3rd Edition

Here's how i roll ~

Main PC in one of the bedrooms, my computer room. 6 internal 500GB hard drives, most space used by movies.
So..

Movies
Divided up into 4 network shares. The odd miscellaneous network share for any TV series i'm watching or documentaries etc.

Documentaries/favourite TV series/Laurel & Hardy etc etc
These live on external hard drives due to lack of drive space/drive bays in main PC.
Quite a few docu's, TV series and movies live only on DVD's due to lack of hard drive space (plus of course a lot of stuff would only get watched once so doesn't warrant taking up hard drive space, but if i had enough hard drives i could ditch all the DVD's and keep the 'live on DVD only' stuff on hard drives that are stored on a shelf or in a cupboard or something)

Music
Something like 250GB (probably a lot more, haven't checked it's size for ages, but i digress), one network share, each band/artist has own folder underneath said share.

There are various other shares, a utilities share, obviously all program updates/installs live here. A photo/pictures share. Other misc shares

Lounge
HTPC - Dual Core Optiplex 745 SFF. Slimline, powerful enough to play everything out there, and best of all, silent.
Old type xbox (500GB hard drive as this used to be my main 'HTPC' until 500GB became way too small and until i discovered 720p content. Old type xboxes can only play up to 480p). Still the machine that gets used most, for TV series, documentaries and general 'cabbage out and stick on a movie' watching.
Standard DVD player (rarely used as the xbox tends to be used for this most of the time).

Main bedroom
HTPC - Dual Core Optiplex 745 SFF.
Old type xbox (250GB hard drive).

Now forgetting the myriad of other games consoles and PC's around the place, the above machines are all networked, so i can just crank up the main PC then content can be watched over the network on any TV in the house. Or, i can fire up the main PC, then temporarily copy whatever i'm watching to one of the HTPC's or old type xboxes, once the copy is done the main PC can be shutdown. Or of course i can plug a USB stick or USB hard drive into a PC and watch stuff that way.

All that's left is to mention how i backup things.
Movies - as i say, most of my movies live on internal hard drives, shared on the network. Every single movie on internal drives is on an external drive as a backup, and is also burnt to DVD (these days i just burn data DVD's and cram on as many movies as i can - as i only use AVI's now this is more space/cost effective). Long gone are the wasteful days of one movie on a DVD in DVD format in my house, we're talking 1000's of movies, and whilst i totally agree with such a collection being user friendly if kept in a strict alphabetical or similar order, it's still 1000's of damn discs everywhere.
It is infinitely more user friendly (for me) to have movies on hard drives, with extra backups as i detailed above.
Now, the only flaw in my cunning plan, is an obvious one. If ever both copies of a given movie hard drive died, blew up, caught fire (or annihilated by a freak solar storm ie EMP pulse or whatever!), the thought of even looking for all the data DVD's for said movies would be a nightmare task, never mind the utterly mind-numbing task of copying them back from many hundreds of DVD's.
Music - everything on the internal hard drive lives on an external drive, but i no longer burn to CD or data DVD, there's just way too much stuff. Plus i don't use music CD's anymore, not with a handful of MP3 players, heck even my Blackberry can be used as an MP3 player.
Utilities etc - everything on the internal hard drive lives on an external drive, and also gets burnt to CD or data DVD

Anyways, that's the way i do things, each to their own, but i don't miss the days before movies on hard drives (even though i had less movies back then).

All i really need/want to do to upgrade the above setup, is to start buying 2TB hard drives (it would have to be a pair at a time) and start moving the contents of a given 500GB movie drive over to a new 2TB drive, then do the same for the external sister movie drive. I'd probably do it like that, leaving 1.5TB free on said pair, then buy another pair of 2TB drives, migrate another 500GB movie drive and external sister drive over, leaving another 1.5TB free. And so on. It'd just mean a heck of a lot less messing about i think. Plus (for a change) it would mean movie drives having enough free space to defrag the things, currently my movie drives are jam-packed solid, no wiggle room. Even when i delete stuff to cram new movies on, i still have no wiggle room.
So 2TB drives, here i come (well soon, anyway)

edit- i meant to say, my AVI's are usually of the following sizes ~
old movies, 700MB to 1.4GB, modern non-HiDef movies are usually the same-ish size, 480p movies are 700MB to about 1.4GB, sometimes more, 720p are usually 1.4GB to 2 or 3GB, sometimes up to 4.3GB. That way i can still avoid using dual layer DVD's for backing them up to DVD, have just never wanted to bother with the things.

 

You can have a lot more, can't remember if 750GB or 1TB was the limit now. My other old type xboxes have their original hard stock hard drives in them if they're used purely for network viewing

 

No, old type xboxes, pre 360 ie the old fashioned looking ones. I do have two 360's but i only use them for gaming. Aside from the fact that every movie i played on 360's prompted me to accept Microsoft codecs (stuff that!), 360's are too prone to RROD and whatever other death to be used for more than light gaming. I'm not into modding 360's, my time is taken up with my other hobbies, no room for wasting time modding/fixing death-prone consoles

 

Naw, it's all enough on topic, i just don't post in here very often as i very rarely upgrade my PC's, if i do it's just new mice or whatever. Which reminds me, you might recall my 'where are you sat' pics, at work my main PC has a Logitech MX620 wireless mouse and the linux box has whatever wired mouse i'm using at the time. When i use my work laptop at home (most of the time now) i use a Logitech M205 wireless mouse with it. Cheap and cheerful, and a very good mouse. So much so that i've just bought another M205 for my main home PC (multiple wireless mice co-exist well, well the ones i buy do anyways), and might buy another M205 for my main linux box at home, so that'd be 3 wireless mouse on the same two desks. Other than that i don't do a lot of 'PC building', as you know i buy/build my stuff for (very) longterm use.

 

No, i don't keep up with new up and coming tech, i never do until such time as i want or need to upgrade, i'd only forget all the details anyways . I'm not interested in Bluray at all, not when there's 720p BR and BD content so easily available (for my eyes 720p is more than enough, a great compromise between quality and size). Why use my processing power/free time ripping/encoding stuff when so many people out there do it for us , so my Q6600 still has many years left in her yet.


Actually myself and my boss were doing some PC building last week, of sorts. A simple task of adding a new disk into the main server's RAID array at one of our branches resulted in a mistaken keypress and it was bye-bye to ALL data, in just a few seconds. All Active Directory, user profiles, email, everything gone. That whole day/late night later, we had rebuilt and restored most data, we are still 2 days behind for local user files and emails as last full backup was 2 days old, and it'll stay that way as we haven't a newer backup. (Will be ensuring that all branches have better backups in future), we still have a day or two next week (we'd have to stop over, nice meals and booze ups as branch is quite a few hours away from us, oh the hardship LOL!) to finish off and get everyone back up and running. RAID is great and everything but press that wrong key and it's all over . We have crazy amounts of gigabytes of engineering documentation still to restore, but this is easy as myself and the boss had almost finished building a centralised server that (overnight) copies all engineering documentation from each remote branch, over to our centralised storage. Eventually the branches can then keep their own local documentation as a temporary backup (for instance if network access to our branch is down) and just use our central server as the documentation resource. We use 'rsync' to incrementally copy over data, some branches have atrocious bandwidth so we have put in place different bandwidth limits for different rsyncs. Said storage server has a few 2TB drives, in fact our main branch backups use 2TB drives that we swap out each day, very fast and very compact. Restores are a breeze. We still have tape backups (LTO2) but we'll eventually migrate those to 2TB drives, tapes are great and everything but hard drives are better and they can be taken offsite (my old firm moved to HDD backups but they weren't offsiteable so not as secure as they might otherwise be). Other branches just use local DAT backups as their local important data is not huge in size.

I will have to crack the whip on some of the other branches (some are in far away foreign lands) as some branches backups are crap, frankly. Our main database data is centralised at our own branch, all other branches access it remotely, so basically all the important data is safe, so when branches lose data it's not usually catastrophic. We obviously have to ensure that branch to branch connectivity is kept on top of.

Anyways, enough of my rattling on, it's just that i've spent a few hours this weekend working on backups and backup reporting scripts, partly to prepare for the day or two at the broken branch on Monday.

 

I actually really enjoy coding, that's why i have so many screens at work, i can put debug code in and have various command sessions open, tailing logfiles etc, it makes testing a breeze. Am currently writing scripts to report better on backups, to give a summary of the most important info, start/end/(and fail) time, gigabytes backed up, average throughput, stuff like that, in daily summaries via email. The way i always write code is such that all the data that goes into the emails is archived to local directories for later reference, i do this for each branch too so there's always a way to get at info, either remotely or locally. Yesterday our Portugese branch was inaccessible for some reason (the weekend so no problem) and this highlighted a bug in one of my scripts, the lack of access was causing all sorts of problems downstream in the code. I managed to solve it quite easily by adding a simple ping command with some result code checking/'if' loops, and am actually very pleased with the outcome. I even managed to have the summary report for an inaccessible branch contain a simple comment stating that the report is empty due to said inaccessibility.
Hopefully this is all on topic enough re all the backup talk , however i must take the kids home so i'll stop rambling now

 

Nothing 'over your head' i'd have thought Fred, what i have is extremely simple. Sure, modding old type xboxes to transform them into a media box is (even with the exact instructions) not for the faint hearted, but rest of the overall setup is extremely simple. It has to be, my other half is completely techn-unaware, and even i like to have things such that when it's actually time to sit down and watch something, it's literally a case of firing up the main PC and an xbox or HTPC in another room, and flick on the TV. There's always at least one PC on anyway, so for me it's a no brainer.

My kids are very tech-aware, but even if they weren't, the idea is that it's (almost) as straightforward as just opening a DVD player's tray and popping in a disc.
All kids movies i get still get converted to DVD format so they have their own takeaway copies that they can watch how they want at home or at a friend's house, but for myself the whole ripping actual DVD's or converting AVI's to DVD format is something i just don't bother with anymore (keeping what i have, current, takes up too much time as it is).

I do write epic posts sometimes (it's a bit like me being someone who doesn't say a lot in real life too often, then every now and then i have indepth epic discussions), glad if the posts are of help sometimes, i'm all about explaining things such that what might appear to be complicated stuff can actually be rather simple. And one of my favourite motto's is "i like simple", i guess i'm a techie that just lives in denial

As to the car, i stick to a good old factory tape player as i can leave my (99pence) tape player MP3 converter thingy in the player, to connect any of my MP3 players to, or my Blackberry can connect in the same way. There's never much of interest on the radio, i usually listen to podcasts in the car (and at work), my own music the rest of the time, i rarely ever listen to the radio. Good job as they're still planning to get rid of analogue radio and replace with crappy inferior digital crap, i certainly won't be junking my equipment and wasting money on expensive digital crap "in the name of saving the environment". Load of old hoax and nonsense. But i digress, i do like to keep things simple, i only use as much technology as is necessary, i don't junk good stuff or replace stuff when there's no valid reason to do so.