RAID or JBOD for movie storage

[darkjuan]

A friend of mine bought me a Sans Digital TR8M+ NAS tower for my birthday. I have quite a large DVD and Blu-ray collection. Currently I have 2 Hitachi 3tb drives for a total of 6tb and will eventually expand off of that in the future.
What would be the best way to set up the tower to hold all my movies. Currently I have my system set up as Striped but one of my drives is faulty and I may end up losing whatever movies I have on there. Converting Blu-ray's and DVD's to mp4 format is a very long process and I really don't want to go through that again (it happened once already) Any suggestions?

 

[tomatthe]

Assuming that controller supports expanding raid sets without destroying them I would probably start by buying another 3tb drive and run raid 5 with them. You would still just have access to 6tb of space, but you would have the advantage of being able to rebuild if one of the drives died. You would also only have one drive letter to deal with which I suppose is just personal preference, but I highly prefer things that way vs a ton of drive letters with things split up. You would also have the ability to add drives to the raid set at a later time without losing the data (assuming it supports this). If you did end up with 8 x 3tb drives in there I would leave one as a hot spare rather then trying to run them all in the same array.

 

[darkjuan]

It's a RocketRAID 622 controller card so yes, it supports raid 5. That sounds like a really good idea. Thanks!

 

[Wisecracker]

I've got 3 5-bay Sans Digital external enclosures, a handful of bare drives, and a spare caddy. Using the eSATA port multiplier I essentially mount a bunch of independent drives in a media directory tree.

I've got physical back-ups of maybe 2-3TB of 'favorite stuff' that I don't want to lose.

I don't think the majority of today's big storage drives are dependable in RAID unless designated as such, and even with the floods you can still find 2TB drives for around $100. Over the years I've simply been rotating in larger drives - haven't made the leap to 3TB just, yet but hopefully that time will arrive at a price point much less than $100.

Most is recorded TV -- everything from The Simpsons to PBS. With my directory structure I stash folders across multiple drives so that if one drive crashes I don't lose more than 15% of any one show.

 

[darkjuan]

Best answer selected by darkjuan.