I guess I didn't really need another hard drive (my parallel ports are already full), but as I looked at the price (250 gigs for $140 and I had a $20 store credit), I just couldn't pass up the deal on a nice new Maxtor Ultra16 250 GB PATA hard drive. Right now, I'm not really sure how I'm going to use it. It's still sitting here blank in my computer as it replaced a really old 20 gig Maxtor drive from 2000. But I've now quickly gained 230 gigs (well...actually only 210 as when it's formatted, the drive is only 233 gigs) and I'm debating how to use it. I think I might start my "television server" project that I've been thinking about for a while, but there some details to get hammered out first.

Basically, I want to take one of my older computers (I have one sitting here that no longer works unfortunately) and just drop the 250 gig drive into it with tons of television shows ripped onto it from DVDs. This way, I can instantly call up any Seinfeld episode at any time from any room equipped to receive it and watch an episode without commercials. Or I can watch any Simpsons, Family Guy or Alias episode too. But before that all gets started, I have to figure out what format I want to rip the DVDs to. I don't want to rip them bit for bit as each DVD is 3-4 gigs and my little 233 gig drive would fill up quickly (though I had planned on having 500 gigs (466 effectively) in the server). So now that I think about it, if I do rip the DVDs bit for bit (minus the special features) I could probably fit 100 or so on two 250 gig drives. Now...let's take a second to figure out how many TV-DVDs I have...

24 - 6 discs x 3 seasons = 18
Alf - 2 discs x 1 season = 2
Alias - 6 discs x 3 seasons = 18
Aqua Teen Hunger Force - 3 discs (I think) x 3 seasons = 9
Arrested Development - 3 discs x 1 season = 3
Band of Brothers - 5 discs x 1 season = 5
Chapelle's Show - 2 discs x 1 season = 2 (2 more soon)
Family Guy - 4 discs x 2 seasons = 8
Futurama - 3 discs x 1 season = 3 (possibly more soon)
The Hire - 1 disc x 2 seasons = 2
MI-5 - 4 discs x 2 seasons = 8 (disc average)
Millenium - 4 discs x 1 season = 4
Mystery Science 3000 Collection = 2 discs x 1 season = 2 (more soon)
Reno 911! - 2 discs x 1 season = 2
SNL: The Best Of... - 1 disc x 4 actors = 4
Seinfeld - 4 discs x 2 seasons = 8 (more soon hopefully)
The Simpsons - 4 discs x 5 seasons = 20 (more soon of course)
The X-Files - 7 discs x 2 seasons = 14 (more soon...but expensive!)

Coming in February - MacGyver: Season 1 and I want to add complete South Park Seasons. So...with the DVDs above, we're at 132 owned DVDs with at least 15 more coming, so let's assume 150 TV-DVDs in my collection that I'd want to serve up. If each one takes up 3 gigs, I could probably fit them on two 250 gig drives and some probably will take less space than the others at a 1-1 conversion ratio. So maybe I don't have to compress them - full motion video should easily stream over standard ethernet cabling and I plan on upgrading any computers that would be on said network to gigabit networking, so I'd have no problems streaming (or so I'm told).

Glad I took the time to work it all out. I was trying to figure out how I'd want to compress them, how I'd store them, what exactly I'd do - but now there's no need. I'll just rip them without compression and without special features and when I fill up one drive, I'll add another and even two more if need be so I'd have 1 TiB on demand. Now that'd be sweet. It just wouldn't fit in one of those nice mini-atx systems.

And yes - I have too many DVDs and spare time.

URL: Maxtor.com - Ultra16 Hard Drive Kits