How much storage?

1.5TB is pretty huge. I think a Blu-ray movie is around 20gb~ (Rough guesstimate), so 1.5TB could store about 75 movies of that size. That's a pretty high amount.

I'd say that the drive size you've chosen should be enough for a good while, and when you need extra space just buy another .

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Awesome, thanks and +rep. Just the kind of info I needed

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Heya,

I backup all my DVD's. I have hundreds. I do not compress. I just rip them straight from DVD to ISO. I use DVDFAB6. I rip the movie only, not the extras and all that and I remove all languages/audios/etc, except for the original 5.1 dolby and the DTS (if it's there) language that the film is supposed to be seen in (ie, mostly English... I don't keep that dolby for spanish and other stuff). So when I load my DVD to watch (mounting the ISO) it just plays the movie, no menus, no nothing, and only one language, etc. Works great. Reduces the file size needed. Total simplicity for me. The discs range from 3.5g to 6g for most of my movies when I do this.

I'm averaging about 170 DVD ISO's per 1 TB.

So, I stay ahead of my collection. And I like to have some redundancy against a disk failing so that I don't have to re-rip and deal with all that (hours and hours of work). So I just get a new 1TB pair of drives and RAID1 them. I don't fool with RAID5 anymore. I've considered RAID6, but it's just a pain in the butt and costly. I just do multiple RAID1 sets. This way I have 1:1 redundancy for each disk. So my hundreds of DVD's are pretty safe in general in that sense (but not perfectly safe of course). Now that you can get 2TB drives, I'll soon switch to these and RAID1 a few of those to decrease the amount of drives it takes to hold my collection with redundancy without switching to a different RAID level (6 for example).

So my point being, 1.5TB is not enough for me. It may not be enough for you in the future. Especially when you add games/music/tv shows/pictures (uncompressed high quality photo albums), etc.

Currently I use WD green drives in RAID1 pairs. They consume little energy, they're extremely quiet, and they stay nice and cool.

So my suggestion to you is that you consider at least getting a 1TB or 1.5TB or even a 2TB drive and then getting another and setting them up in RAID1 so that you don't lose hours and hours of reload time in case of a drive fail. It would take me days and days to reload mine if I had to rerip and recatalog it all. So consider how big your collection is going to get and prepare for it early. Also, consider how many drives you can accommodate in your case and that your motherboard can handle. My motherboard can take 6 SATA drives. But with PCIe and PCI slots, I can add more SATA controller cards to add more drives. This way I can have tons of drives in my case. I currently run with 8 drives in pairs of RAID1 to hold my collection. But as mentioned, I'll soon switch to 2TB drives to reduce the number of drives it takes to hold my collection so that I can make room for more drives for more data as my need grows.

Good luck!

Very best,

Thanks for all the highly insightful posts sharing your personal experience! The one big thing I am carrying away is to purchase another drive when or before I start archiving so as to create a backup.

Thank you also for being so detailed in how much space each archive was taking for most of you