I was going through my large DVD collection (all legitimately purchased, of course) and I noticed that some of the DVDs that I bought three years ago which used to play fine have now decayed to the point of being unplayable. I’m astonished that something I purchased for 7RMB could be so shoddy.
Anyway, now I’ve decided I want to rip my remaining playable DVDs before they too go to pot. I’ve decided that I’m going to rip them straight up (on OS X, MacTheRipper is a fantastic program for doing this) instead of trying to encode them in MPEG-4 or H.264, whose image quality I’m pretty disappointed with. But with the size of my collection, I’m going to need a good 600-700 gigs or so if I rip these VOB files straight-up.
Doing a bit of research on the Net, I’ve found that a RAID5 could be ideal for me. Not only would it give me this sort of space using cheaper 250-320 gig drives, but it would also better protect me against a hard drive failure (yeah, I know RAIDs don’t protect you from user error, file corruption, etc.)
Does anyone have experience either building their own external RAID or purchasing one straight-up? I’m on an iMac and will probably move to a laptop in the future, so I don’t want something that involves installing a RAID controller in my computer. Rather, I’d want something that can connect via Firewire or USB2. It doesn’t need any fancy abilities like hot-swapability and I’m not using it as a hardcore file server so the read/write performance could be relatively slow. I think something like 4x250G would be plenty for my needs.
I’ve found some directions online for how to make one, but since this is Taiwan, I’m sure I can get one pre-made superquick. Anyone have any experience with a project like this?
