The Geek Crew - Computer Questions

X Post Whore FTP Server Offline Truth Is Treason, In The Empire Of Lies Posts: 3903 Gender:	Re: Computer Questions Reply #195 - Apr 30^th, 2014 at 11:33am Looking for a good high TB hard drive (around 3TB) with some good read speed. Anyone have a recommendation?
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b0b GeekCrew Administrator FTP Server Offline The revolution will not be televised. Posts: 7464 Battle Creek, Michigan Gender:	Re: Computer Questions Reply #196 - Apr 30^th, 2014 at 11:54am Avoid Seagate for now, they've been having some longevity issues. In perhaps the ultimate upset, Hitachi DeathDeskstar hard drives currently have the best reliability. -b0b (...we're talking about single-digit percentage differences though.)
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X Post Whore FTP Server Offline Truth Is Treason, In The Empire Of Lies Posts: 3903 Gender:	Re: Computer Questions Reply #197 - Jun 4^th, 2014 at 11:21am Bob, Do you have a way to give me access to some of your delicious media files? I know you have some high quality TV/anime/etc and I'm looking to update some of my lower quality stuff. Let me know what I can do. Thanks! X
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b0b GeekCrew Administrator FTP Server Offline The revolution will not be televised. Posts: 7464 Battle Creek, Michigan Gender:	Re: Computer Questions Reply #198 - Jun 10^th, 2014 at 12:28pm Yeah, let me get to work on the FTP. It's been on my list of things to do for a couple years now. -b0b (...1080p FTW!)
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X Post Whore FTP Server Offline Truth Is Treason, In The Empire Of Lies Posts: 3903 Gender:	Re: Computer Questions Reply #199 - Jun 12^th, 2014 at 3:39pm I have to suggest to anyone that isn't using Plex and has a decent collection of media and wants to access it anywhere...Plex is an amazing program. Can't wait to share the wealth! If anyone does want to share servers "agentx216" is my user name. Let me know what's yours is and we'll share it up! X
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b0b

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Re: Computer Questions
Reply #200 - Jun 13^th, 2014 at 3:58pm

I haven't used Plex in quite awhile, having switched back to straight file shares when we built the new HTPC. Show us some screenshots!

Specifically, how is the media management these days? Can you get information about media based on file name (e.g. movie reviews/summaries/ratings?) Does it keep track of what media you've viewed? Sometimes Meredith and I will watch a series intermittently and we have a heck of a time remembering where we left off.

-b0b
(...mmm Plex.)

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Re: Computer Questions
Reply #201 - Jun 14^th, 2014 at 12:44am

So this is what the main page looks like for mine. A lot of items are customizable - not to the extreme sense but enough to make it your own.

Plex works off gathering metadata by conforming your file names to a particular naming scheme. Autobooks are a little difficult because the database they use doesn't have a ton of authors but they do have quite a few. You can customize any of the photos or metadata after it's uploaded and you can lock it so that updating your database doesn't overwrite your wanted information.

I bought the lifetime membership ($75 one time fee) and can sync my content to my phone or tablet and have access to it when I'm not connected to wifi. When I come back on to the server, it syncs where I left off. Not always perfect, but I haven't had too many issues of getting my place back from an audio book if I had to shut down my phone.

This is the movie outlook. Random selector is there as well (shuffle actually).

When accessing the movie from the server side this is the metadata displayed.

When you access it from your own web portal and have some added extensions that come from independent developers, this is what you can get.

You can select an item as watched or unwatched. When you exit a movie in the middle of playing, it will save your spot and put it on your main page in your "On Deck" section.

You can even access your own content. The below is my pastor's Q&A series at church that I'm helping him with, so having access to this from multiple area and the ability to take it off line is also a plus. The naming schemes take a little time to get used to but programs like FileBot and mp3tag are great for uniform and large multiple quick changes.

TV Shows

They get organized into seasons

Then their own episode. The metadata is pulled from TVDB.com

Anime is displayed as TV shows but you cannot do multiple types like Anime series with single shots. However, TVDB.com has many of their "specials" as the movies so having movies combined with the regular series is easy. But I cannot have something like "Angel Sanctuary" in this folder since it is a movie and not a series.

Plex is pretty versatile and the forum community/support is excellent. The updates aren't nearly as quick as you'd like (as far as extra features go) but the code is stable that it's hard to complain. Yes it'd be nice to select multiple episodes and do a one click as having them be marked as "watched" or being able to have an "ebook" category to access them elsewhere would be cool as well. But the product is stable and I was glad to support it.

So, Bob, you could be 22 minutes into season 4 episode 1 of Star Trek TNG and leave for vacation for a month and watch 160 other shows or movies on Plex from your phone and you'd be able to pick it right back up.

If you just want access to your media, obviously, as you said in this thread, you have Windows do that work for you. But the metadata with the accessibility on multi-platforms and organization is totally worth it for me.

Questions?

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Re: Computer Questions
Reply #202 - Jun 15^th, 2014 at 4:21pm

Wow, thanks for the detailed screenshots!

It's definitely evolved quite a bit since I last played with it. I'll have to throw up a VM and give it another go. I'm just hoping it allows me to stream data natively instead of compressing it for playback. The vast majority of my content is 1080p these days and it doesn't really play well with real-time compression.

On a side note, what did you think of Attack on Titan? It's been on my list of must-watch shows for months.

-b0b
(...yay anime!)

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X Post Whore FTP Server Offline Truth Is Treason, In The Empire Of Lies Posts: 3903 Gender:	Re: Computer Questions Reply #203 - Jun 15^th, 2014 at 10:24pm The show is great. A little weird but it's a show that's getting me back into anime again. The pacing is great and not rushed like a lot of other ones. It's got good voice acting (only in Japanese) and interesting premise. As for 1080p, I don't have much in the way of that but Plex runs that rate. X
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Re: Computer Questions
Reply #204 - Jun 16^th, 2014 at 10:29am

When you're ready for another show, check out Steins;Gate (note the weird spelling/spacing). It's an absolutely amazing show focused on time travel, my personal favorite plot device. It takes a few episodes to really get rolling, but the story and character development are truly impressive. It's one of those experiences that really gets stuck in your head!

Best of all, it involves anti-government conspiracy theories (centered around everybody's favorite particle physics organization, CERN) and plenty of references to real-life crackpots like John Titor.

-b0b
(...can't wait for the next series!)

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X Post Whore FTP Server Offline Truth Is Treason, In The Empire Of Lies Posts: 3903 Gender:	Re: Computer Questions Reply #205 - Jun 17^th, 2014 at 12:39pm Ok, so who's been spying on me to make a show that has a lot of my interests?! X (will check it out!)
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Re: Computer Questions
Reply #206 - Jun 18^th, 2014 at 6:47am

Laura just watched her first anime series. I hadn't seen it before.

We watched Deathnote which is just amazing. The writing is very smart and the characters aren't idiots (except when the story calls for some of the side characters to be). The ending was a little off for me but when you find yourself rooting for maybe the bad guy...it's good!

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Re: Computer Questions
Reply #207 - Sep 9^th, 2014 at 5:46am

RAID question

So I have a 4-bay Synology that I just got a 2nd HD for. I was thinking about doing JBOD rather than a RAID. But then I was thinking about all the data I could loose and got scared.

So my question is, with the ability to do RAID 0, 1, 5 ,5+Spare, 6, and 10 - what's the best configuration where I can still use the max amount of HD space (4X4TB) where if one drive goes down I don't loose any data?

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Re: Computer Questions
Reply #208 - Sep 9^th, 2014 at 3:52pm

With any drives above 1TB, RAID 6 is going to be your only safe option. Unfortunately, RAID 6 is also very expensive in terms of disk/bay usage as it requires two parity disks. This would leave you with two data disks in your four-bay array.

If you don't want to give up two bays just for parity, you can go with RAID 5 instead. This only provides a single parity disk, leaving you with three usable disks for storage. The downside is that large SATA disks take a very long time to rebuild. If you lost one disk, it would take around four days for the replacement disk to rebuild, and this doesn't include the time required to get the replacement disk. Even if you pay to have the replacement drive cross-shipped, you'd be looking at a week with no parity disk, meaning a second failure would kill your array and destroy your data.

Unfortunately, with a 4-bay array, you're left with a really tough decision between sufficient security and sufficient usable space. Even with an 8-bay Synology, I found it difficult to give up two bays for RAID 6, but I've seen way too many failures on high-capacity SATA drives to risk anything less.

Ultimately, no matter which RAID type you go with, the most important aspect of data protection is having an offsite backup. I use a service called CrashPlan to protect the data on my Synology, VMware host server, and all of my PCs and laptops. I pay ~$150 for unlimited cloud backups for up to 10 systems, and I've put ~30TB on the cloud over the past two years so it really is unlimited. You can also use the CrashPlan application to perform backups to local systems (e.g. back up one PC to another PC) to prevent against data loss from hard disk crashes, viruses, etc. I run a "local" backup from my PCs and servers to the Synology in addition to my cloud backup, just for that extra peace of mind. Also, you can provide your own encryption key when you backup your data, just to ensure it is absolutely and completely unreadable to a third party (including CrashPlan themselves). I've been really, really happy with CrashPlan and can't recommend it strongly enough.

-b0b
(...no easy answers, unfortunately.)

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X Post Whore FTP Server Offline Truth Is Treason, In The Empire Of Lies Posts: 3903 Gender:	Re: Computer Questions Reply #209 - Sep 10^th, 2014 at 5:09pm Would you say that it's fine to do CrashPlan and just do no RAID but Just A Bunch Of Disks (JBOD)?
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