What kind of computer would you build to hold 10,000 cd's?

[Armitage]

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
Also, for ripping Plextor SCSI CD-ROM is excellent, another good one is the IDE ASUS 50X.

Maybe something like this this to help speed-up/automate the ripping?

Or these:
4 CDROM Tower
7 CDROM Tower

This stuff looks kind of old, but you get the idea.

 

[owensdj]

DaveSimmons, I see your point about using a bunch of non-RAID drives, but I don't think that would be possible in this situation using IDE drives. As far as I know, RAID controller cards don't have an option for using the attached drives in a non-RAID configuration. That would put a limit of 4 hard drives, even if you assume the system is using a SCSI CD-ROM. A limit of 4 hard drives would limit the total space in the system to 640GB with current drive sizes. That might not be enough.

Spreading the songs across 4 drives might make organising those tens of thousands of songs more difficult than using a single large volume.

 

[Armitage]

Originally posted by: owensdj
DaveSimmons, I see your point about using a bunch of non-RAID drives, but I don't think that would be possible in this situation using IDE drives. As far as I know, RAID controller cards don't have an option for using the attached drives in a non-RAID configuration. That would put a limit of 4 hard drives, even if you assume the system is using a SCSI CD-ROM. A limit of 4 hard drives would limit the total space in the system to 640GB with current drive sizes. That might not be enough.

Spreading the songs across 4 drives might make organising those tens of thousands of songs more difficult than using a single large volume.

I fairly certain 3ware has a JBOD option (Just a Bunch Of Disks) on their RAID cards.

As for accessing the individual drives, Linux has something called LVM (Logical Volume Manager?) that can span a filesystem across several disks.

I think I would still go for RAID 5 though. Your overall reliabilty & maintenance will be easier.

 

[lastig21]

Can anyone tell me a reason to go with the 3ware 7850 as opposed to the 7810 for this type of application. The increased speed is not an issue as they don't have to be incredibly fast to store/play mp3's. Are there any more differences between these two scsi card models?

 

[Gunbuster]

Get an Ultrium tape drive for backup, 100GB native

It only runs around $4000

 

[WhiteMyth]

Wow that's a huge project. But why is everyone suggesting these big expensive backup solutions costing over $1k? I doubt drive failure will be a really big problem, so you could go with something slower but a lot cheaper, like dvd R/rw.
Processor speed won't be a big issue, although I wonder about noise with all those HD's. I guess he'll probably run some speaker cable from one room with the computer to another room with a sound system. If he's a real audiophile like it sounds, he won't want a lot of noise while listening to music.

 

[zephyrprime]

Consider using MP3Pro + VBR. It could save a lot of disk space for you.

As far as encoding goes, I'm sure the professor has access to school computer labs where several computers could be simultaneously operated by one person.

 

[Pariah]

"Can anyone tell me a reason to go with the 3ware 7850 as opposed to the 7810 for this type of application."

There really isn't one. The 7850 has much better RAID 5 performance (up to 500% faster writes), but since the data will likely only be written once then just sit there, there isn't any need to shell out for the extra. 3Ware cards are all IDE, not SCSI.

"It only runs around $4000"

Wow, only $4000 not including $80+/tape media? A steal at twice the price....

"I doubt drive failure will be a really big problem, so you could go with something slower but a lot cheaper, like dvd R/rw."

It would take about 175 writeable DVD discs to back that up. That alone is reason to not use it. After adding up the drive cost and that many discs, you're still over $1000. When dealing with this large an amount of data there isn't any practical dirt cheap way to back it up.

 

[chilled]

could he use WMA 8 instead of mp3?
for me 128Kb of wma8 offers equivalent quality to 192kb mp3.

but then again, i am not exactly an expert

 

[Ben50]

I think the time to encode all these cd's would be such an overwhelming factor that he should not even bother. If he is going to attempt ripping all those cd's, he needs some kind of automated system for changing cd's. Maybe a jukebox style cd player that can output data to a computer in some way could be used to automate the process a little. Trying to rip all those cd's by hand would take months of work doing just one cd at a time. After the ripping is done, then there is the task of naming all the tracks. CDDB will have some of it but there will be plenty that it doesn't have. He should definitely hire a data entry service to enter all this data because it would take him a lifetime otherwise. Many companies hire college students to do just that type of job so there is probably a service in town that does this.

The storage is almost a no-brainer with basically just a lot of hard drives hooked together through raid or in some other fashion. I assume that the professor knows about the mp3 format and also that his music will lose quality when encoding them with an mp3 encoder. This can be a major issue for audio enthusiasts so make sure he knows what his music will sound like after changing it into the new format.

I hope this professor has stored aside a lot of money for this project because he is going to need it.

 

[GoodRevrnd]

If we're gonna be byte-pinching here, use OGG! It's slightly smaller than MP3 and I think it sounds better.

EDIT: I didn't consider that probably most MP3 encoding software would be more sophisticated. Something to consider.

 

[OldScratch]

Just give him a couple of giant hollow tower cases, and tell him to stack as many CDs in there as he can. When he wants to listen to one, tell him to grab it out of the pile, put it in his CD player, and press PLAY.

 

[Batti]

Cool project, BTW.

I have a silly question - if the source material is CD's, then isn't that your backup? Why burn what you already have? Make it RAID5, and if need be, rip again from originals.

 

[owensdj]

Batti, you're correct in that those audio CDs are a backup of all of the songs. On the other hand, the time it will take to encode and organize those tens of thousands of songs will make the MP3 data in the system very valuable.

 

[lastig21]

With the Raid 5, I he can lose a harddrive and keep all data. I think he needs the backup to recover from a disaster. If 2 drives went out at the same time, all his data would be lost and he would have to start from scratch. I don't think he would want to put the time and effort into this project again. Using the cd's as the backup may be a hassell for him anyway, as he plans to move them out of the house.

BTW: I have a very basic/premliminary listing of what I'm planning to put in the computer here. Thanks for all the help.

 

[axelfox]

I don't know if any has said this, but think about having him encode with MP3PRO.

80Kb/s under mp3pro = 128kb/s regular mp3.

 

[staticfly]

100 cds ehh... well...

use one of the cd databases to fill in all the info for the mp3's title, albumm, artist....

get a cd changer... they are kinda expensive, but the time saved would be well worth the money

good luck getting that many drives together... by the time you get this done, bluelight dvd's might be out.. i think they store something like 100gb

if your encoding.... 192 is a bare minimum.. this guy is a music nut, he will easily be able to tell the difference. you may want to go to 256.

go with the 3ware raid 5 controller and 8 160gb maxtors.. make SURE it supports that big of a drive. Buy a extra to have one to hot swap at all times.

one note... this many mp3s could bring down most mp3 databasing programs... when winamp 3 gets done, it might be the way to go.

 

[zephyrprime]

I just calculated how much it would take to pay people to rips all these cds. Assuming each operator has as many computers at his disposal as he wants & it takes 10 seconds to kick off & encode & the pay rate is $10/hr, it would cost $16800 dollars! It would be much cheaper to buy some sort of machine to do this or hire some sort of service.

 

[Ionizer86]

New and more efficient encoders come out once in a while, and so do new hard drives (imaging something so big won't be fun :Q). I don't think the project is worth it because once new encoders come, he may feel regretful for having encoded the music on an inferior format. The hard drive issue isn't so great as he can drag/drop songs onto future larger drives.

Well, organizing the songs shouldn't be a big deal because mp3 software automatically names files and shoves them in appropriate folders. In addition, he may want to look into the Kenwood 72x true X cdrom drives....for obvious reasons

 

[McCarthy]

All those spinning HDs, all the fans to exhaust the case heat, lots of noise - and just for 192kbps...wow, weird.

MP3Pro would be a very bad idea, imo. So would WMA8. When he's done he's going to have a huge collection of material, the primary value of which being the time taken to do it. To lock himself into a going nowhere standard like MP3Pro or a highly controlled one like WMA might really limit his options in the future as to what portables he could throw data on and play it back properly.

Though definately consider your mp3 encoder carefully. LAME's encoder would probably be best. Be a real shame to rip all this using some crap encoder. I'd even say go for variable bitrate for improved quality with the same file size rather than to save space, but even that can be problematic with a few portables.

I'm not sure that the motherboard/cpu chosen for the encoding should necessarily be the same one used for the eventual server either. Is this mp3 server he's building to be his only machine or will it (once encoding is done) be a light duty machine only used for playback and encoding new arrivals? The encoding machine needs to be massively fast just because of the amount of encode time you're talking about here, but the playback machine should be reliable and quiet above all else, or so I'd think.

Just because of the heat/noise considerations I'd lean towards using external/removable drives as the backups and leaving them in a closet (somewhere else). RAID is great, as long as you can stand the heat. And the noise. And as long as your computer never gets struck by ligtening, burnt up in a fire, dropped by movers or stolen. External drives stored offsight do much better then. So would DVD/tape backup of course, though current DVD would be a pain and tape limits where the data can be read. With two sets of working drives he could have one setup at his office and one at home and if a disk fails, restore it from the other machine. External firewire (or even USB2.0) drives would be great here, he could disconnect the ones not in use and have them quietly powered down off to the side with just the one in use going at any time, either on system A or B or both. And lock them up when the brother's kids are over and want to use the computer

--Mc

 

[Ben50]

I think the money he spends on this whole idea would be better spent on a bigger house and some cd storage racks.

 

[lastig21]

I think the money he spends on this whole idea would be better spent on a bigger house and some cd storage racks.

I tend to agree


I am not overly worried about the time it would take to encode the data to mp3's, as I would not be the one doing it. I'm doubt the professor would have much problem with it either. He has collected this music for his entire life, so a couple years of ripping it to mp3's will probably be a non-issue to him.

I have thought about going with a higher bitrate, but I will leave that up to him. The case I'm considering can hold up to 14 drives I believe, so I may think about going with 2 Raid 5 setups to allow for higher bitrates. The guy hasn't mentioned what price he is looking to spend, he just wanted me to price him a computer. I'm supposed to lay out some options and prices for him tomorrow and see what he thinks. I don't have a clue how much he is willing to invest in this project.

 

[ChefJoe]

Am I the only one suprised that a music professor is converting his beloved collection into mp3s? I love mp3s for being compact and readily accessible on my HD, but I still can hear the difference between a 190 mp3 and a digital cd.... particularly in the bass and the definition of the trebble.


edit, guess I'm not... I finally got to the last few posts.

 

[NuclearFusi0n]

Originally posted by: zephyrprime
Consider using MP3Pro + VBR. It could save a lot of disk space for you.

As far as encoding goes, I'm sure the professor has access to school computer labs where several computers could be simultaneously operated by one person.

MP3Pro is is a crap hack of MP3....Don't bother with it.
If your guy insists on MP3s, use LAME 3.92 with --alt-preset standard. If he's a true anal master for quality, go --alt-preset extreme
Don't let anybody tell you that MP3 sounds like crap... a proper LAME encode is pretty much indistiushable from the orignal source

 

[lastig21]

What bitrate does the lame encoding alt-preset extreme use? The professor said he didn't want mp3's today because of the loss of quality. He said he would like all the cd's ripped to his computer is the original wav format. I had a good laugh to myself about that one. I will need to do some bitrate/encoding comparisons and let him listen to them to see if he still wants to procede with the project. It appears that 256k is now the minimum bitrate, but will probably be upped to 320.