Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
About a year ago, our KODI server ran out of space on the 3TB hard drive we use to store Blu-ray media. I agonized a month or two over what to do, before breaking out and buying another 3TB drive. With the additional 3TB drive, our server now had:
• 3TB - boot drive, blu-ray TV and movie storage (filling quickly) • 2TB - DVD movie, DVD TV, music, and picture storage • 3TB - blu-ray movie storage (98% full)
At the time, the additional 3TB drive seemed like a good idea, but I really didn’t like the idea of having the same media (Blu-ray) on two separate drives. I’ve split media before in the form of photographs. Organizing 10 years of photographs stored on 20 DVDs is a nightmare I didn’t want to repeat.
Last month, I celebrated getting closer to the big ‘50’, and, as part of that celebration, got an 8TB Seagate ST8000VN0022-2EL drive. When looking at drives, I seriously considered a 6TB drive since the 8TB was significantly more money, but I’m happy I chose the 8TB since there’s a bit of room to spare.
I had an LGA 1156 motherboard and i3 processor that were a bit newer than the LGA 775 and Core 2 Quad processor our media server has been running for the past couple of years. Although the LGA 1156 isn’t capable of the SATA 6Mb/s speed of the new 8TB drive, I figured the board and CPU would be an improvement over the current setup. Before swapping parts, I needed a CPU fan and a mount for the solid-state drive I intended to use as a boot drive. I picked up a Deep Cool GAMMAXX 300 cooler and generic SSD mount. When I went to mount the 8TB hard drive, I ran into a problem. Most hard drives have 3 mounting holes on each side, two at each end and one in the center. If I used the home theatre case I wanted to use, it would have meant mounting the 8TB drive using only 2 screws. I removed the old motherboard from the HTPC case and put the LGA 1156 board and i3 CPU in (I installed the Deep Cool CPU cooler first), added 4GB of RAM and the SSD. First POST (Power On Self Test) was successful, and I was able to boot to the multiboot USB key I created to install Linux.
Unfortunately, no matter which distribution I tried to install, the system rebooted a few seconds after the distribution started to load. I’d previously used the DDR3 RAM in another system, same for the power supply (I checked it anyway and it had steady voltage). I checked the CMOS battery and it registered over 3 volts. It seemed like the problem was either the CPU or motherboard. This is one of the problems of buying used components, damage isn’t always visible and testing isn’t always possible.
Luckily, I still had the LGA 775 board and Core 2 Quad. The HTPC case was a bit of a pain so I put everything in the Corsair SPEC-01 case our KODI server had previously lived in. Mounting the 8TB drive was still a bit of a challenge. The SPEC-01 case has a plastic caddy for drives. That caddy has 6 plastic bits that hold the drive in place (3 on each side). I had to file the middle bits down to mount the 8TB drive, but, once it was in the caddy, it was a lot more solid than it was in the HTPC case.
I chose to install Linux Mint 18.2 XFCE because I’ve been using it on a couple of machines lately, and I really like it. Installation went a lot smoother on the Core 2 Quad-based system. After the installation, I updated the system and installed the proprietary NVidia drivers for the fanless 1GB PCIe video card I’d previously been using. On reboot, I ran into a bit of an issue, the NVidia card seemed to think our 40” LCD TV was a 72” variation of the same TV – as a result I couldn’t even read the text “home” below the home icon. I rolled back to the nouveau driver and things looked fine. I tried one more time with the NVidia driver, and this time it seemed to display text fine.
Next, I disabled the screensaver, installed KODI, and set KODI to start on first boot. Although I could use the server to rip our DVD media, I prefer to rip media on my main desktop system (which has a faster processor and a Blu-ray drive). I normally use Filezilla (via SSH) to transfer media over. Because I’m often only transferring a few DVDs or one Blu-ray, it usually doesn’t take too long, but I knew that I was facing the monumental task of transferring over 5TB of data on the 3 drives to the single 8TB drive, transferring from another system wasn’t going to cut it.
With the Linux installation done, and KODI installed, I shut down the system and attached the 8TB hard drive. On the next boot I made a folder to mount the drive:
sudo mkdir /mnt/media
I used blkid to determine the UUID of the 8TB drive, and used that information to add the mount point to /etc/fstab:
UUID=8b353bdf-9481-4779-a2c9-59e430ef0596 /mnt/media ext4 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
On reboot, I discovered I couldn’t write to the drive because the mount point is owned by root:root. I really didn’t want linuxuser:linuxuser to have permission for the whole mount point, so I made some sub-directories off the mount point:
sudo mkdir /mnt/media/Movies
sudo mkdir /mnt/media/Movies/DVD
sudo mkdir /mnt/media/Movies/Blu-ray
sudo mkdir /mnt/media/Music
sudo mkdir /mnt/media/Music_Videos
sudo mkdir /mnt/media/Pictures
sudo mkdir /mnt/media/TV
sudo mkdir /mnt/media/TV/DVD
sudo mkdir /mnt/media/TV/Blu-ray
At the top level, there are 5 directories: Movies, Music, Music Videos, Pictures and TV. I created sub-directories under the Movies and TV to separate lower quality DVD video from Blu-ray video. I then changed the ownership at the top level of each directory, making sure to include the -R (recursive) switch so all the sub-directories were owned by linuxuser:linuxuser:
sudo chown -R linuxuser:linuxuser /mnt/media/Movies
sudo chown -R linuxuser:linuxuser /mnt/media/Music
sudo chown -R linuxuser:linuxuser /mnt/media/Music_Videos
sudo chown -R linuxuser:linuxuser /mnt/media/Pictures
sudo chown -R linuxuser:linuxuser /mnt/media/TV
SSHing into the server, I was able to write (copy files) to each of the directories off the media directory, but not the /mnt/media parent directory.
Now, it was finally time to start copying media over. I have a hard drive “toaster” connected to my main workstation. My first thought was to copy the smaller media by putting the 2TB drive in the toaster and sending the files via SSH/Filezilla. The first DVD was going to take in excess of 8 minutes to copy. Thinking about the Blu-ray media, I knew this just wasn’t going to work, so I tried hooking the toaster up to the server itself and copying the files via USB. This really didn’t work much better, so I ended up installing each drive in the server and copying directly drive to drive - which resulted in about a 3x to 6x performance improvement (peaking at 190 MB/s at one point). It still took the better part of 2 days to copy all of the media over, though some of this had to do more with the media being spread out over the drives than anything else.
When I got the 8TB drive, I wasn’t sure it would work at all with the ancient LGA 775 motherboard. Before installing the drive in the Core 2 Quad, I tested and partitioned the drive on my newer FM2-based system (which has an A8-5600K APU). In fact, the first 8TB drive wouldn’t show at all in the FM2 system’s BIOS, nor in Windows or Linux, though when I took it back to the retailer they claimed it worked in their system. Since I was well within the warranty period, they gave me a credit for the store. I picked up an identical drive (which had dropped in price those few days), and ended up with a bit of credit left over. That credit ended up going towards the CPU cooler (which is still in the HTPC) and SSD mount (which is also in the HTPC since the SPEC-01 can mount an SSD in any of the trays). The second drive was recognized by all systems I plugged it into - odd because it was identical to the other 8TB drive.
I’d still like to upgrade our KODI server to take advantage of the SATA 6Mb/s speed that the 8TB drive is capable of. At this point, I’m thinking of an AM4 board and a low-end CPU like the Ryzen 3 1300X. With 4GB DDR4 RAM, it would come to approximately $320-$380 CDN depending on the motherboard and RAM. Christmas is only 2 months away, so those plans will probably wait until some time in the new year.
Next month, back to more KODI add-ons, tips and tricks.