Running out of space on our media center

Our media center configuration

Tucked inside a Corsair Spec-01 case, alongside one of the walls in our living room, is the hardware for our media center. The hardware inside the case is as follows:

• MSI MS-7A74 1.0 Motherboard
• Intel Core i3-7100 CPU (4 cores @ 3.90GHz)
• NVidia GeForce GTX 970 video card (running the proprietary drivers)
• 4GB of DDR4 RAM (I really should up the RAM, but haven’t had the need to so far)
• 1 x 500GB Seagate SSD
• 2 x 8TB Seagate Ironwolf Hard Drives

I recently “upgraded” our media center from an i7-2600-based CPU, which is older, but used DDR3 RAM, of which we had plenty (DDR4 on the other hand)…

4GB is enough as we just run Xubuntu Linux on the system, with KODI and Jellyfin running in the background. Most of the time the system sits idle.

We’re in trouble…

The other day I pulled down one of the 250 DVD/Blu-ray binders we use to store media. This was a binder that I figured we might have some DVDs and Blu-ray discs that haven’t been re-ripped since I deleted our entire library a couple of years back.

As I went through the binder I slowly realized that most of the binder needed to be ripped, transferred temporarily to our media center, pulled to my main workstation for encoding (compressing), then the small files transferred back to our media center.

Even worse, the majority of discs that needed to be ripped were actually Blu-ray discs, which, even when compressed, take up quite a bit more space than compressed DVDs.

I started ripping media on the workstation that we have 3 Blu-ray drives, and an HD-DVD player attached to. I managed to back up 1 stack (of 4 stacks) over the past couple of days. Slow progress, I felt, and while I’d like to get all the stacks put away, I wasn’t in a rush…

Now we’re really in trouble…

I wasn’t in a rush until I noticed the 8TB “BACKUP” drive in our media center was 96% full. Hard drives don’t like to be maxed out in a typical setup, it’s a good way to introduce errors on a drive (when it’s full). The main drive the media center uses, mounted under /mnt, happened to be 89% full. This information was bad for a couple of reasons:

• While I could probably copy the data I’d ripped over, the drive space would be pretty low.
• My rsync job isn’t behaving as expected. It’s copying changes over, but not deleting differences off the /BACKUP drive.

I scoured the drives for large data that could be adding to the problem. A single Blu-ray, uncompressed, can be 50GB, or 100GB for dual-layer.

But we ran into this problem before, so I started compressing the previously uncompressed files. All the Blu-ray content on our media center has already been compressed.

I managed to free up some space on both drives (some ISOs I had in physical form), but this only brought the /BACKUP drive down to 90%, and the /mnt drive was still at 89%.

Possible solutions

The most obvious solution is to buy larger drives. But looking at the content I still have to rip, and knowing it’s not the only binder that I might not have ripped all the content, I don’t think 10TB drives would be enough. Buying 12TB drives might last me a little longer if I stop buying physical media, which I probably will need to do as we really no longer have space to store the media. Sadly it appears Canada Computers only has Toshiba or WD Gold drives in this capacity. Both drives, while listed by Canada Computers, don’t appear to be available.

Jumping to 14TB the price also jumps exponentially: WD Red Pro drives are $469. Two, plus taxes, would be $1060, just for 2 drives – not in our “not for profit salary” budget.

The other thought I had was to build a NAS, and just buy 1 additional 8TB Seagate Ironwolf. Recently I’ve been trying out TrueNAS scale at work. If I had 3 x 8TB drives I could set up a RAID-Z1, 2 drives of space 16TB, and 1 drive for parity. The theory is one drive can die, and data is safe. But I’m not sure of this. What happens if the drive that dies is the parity drive? Or is there even a parity drive, do they all do a bit of parity?

On top of this I would need to back up the DATA first, which would mean I’d need 8TB of free drive space.

It’s an intriguing idea as I would probably hide the NAS somewhere out of sight, and just use something like a Tiny Form Factor PC as our media center in the living room… and an old Mac Mini as our media streaming machine in another room.

Some more thinking needed on this. I thought about buying used drives, but we don’t really have the capacity to run SAS drives (which tend to be less expensive), and I’m not sure I trust used drives without warranty (Mind you the warranty is probably up on my 8TB Ironwolfs anyway).