What are people storing with Drive Pool?

[ben98923]

I don't mean to ask a stupid or impertinent question, but I keep seeing people saying they have 60 TB of storage or 25 drives using Drive Pool and I keep wondering, what are they storing?  I feel like it's one of those things I *should* know the answer to, that everyone else probably reads between the lines and does, but not me...  is it porn?  is it illegally downloaded movies? is it pirated music?  is it legitimately downloaded DVR content?  what is it that is that could be taking up that much space?

 

Thanks for any help appeasing my curiosity.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Linux ISOs. 

 

 

 

TV Shows (13TBs), Movies (6TBs), Anime (4TBs), Porn (9TBs), Music (not sure, not that much, as I'm not really a music person), every ISO from Technet/MSDN that I could download and all sorts of installers (for personal usage and for testing). And yes, Linux ISOs.  Totally 2.5TBs for all of my software.

Additionally 2.5TBs for Client Backup Database, 

 

 

These are approximate values, and *everything* in my pool is duplicated. No exceptions. 

 

Also, piracy and illegal are relative terms. Different places have different laws, and it gets mirky fast. 

For instance, in a large part of the world, it's illegal to rip BluRay's you OWN, to your computers. Period. 

And the DMCA (in the USA), it's the redistribution of materials that is illegal, or circumventing copy protection. 

 

 

And I know with stuff like the dvrms toolkit, you can post process recorded TV from WMC pretty easily. And other PVR systems have some complicated stuff you can do. 

[ben98923]

Thanks for the honest answer.  And don't misunderstand, I wasn't passing any judgments on what people are storing.  I was just terribly curious because it never occurred to me before tonight that many non-commercial users were setting up such large storage systems in their homes (and by many I mean there is a whole subculture devoted to it, and software built to help and I just had no idea). 

[Umfriend]

I would have had a 100TB Pool if I could just think what to store on it that made at least a little bit of sense. Boys, toys etc.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Thanks for the honest answer.  And don't misunderstand, I wasn't passing any judgments on what people are storing.  I was just terribly curious because it never occurred to me before tonight that many non-commercial users were setting up such large storage systems in their homes (and by many I mean there is a whole subculture devoted to it, and software built to help and I just had no idea). 

 

You're very welcome.

 

And I didn't interpret it as judgement. It's just that piracy is a very, very murky subject.  Like I said, the laws vary drastically, depending on where you live. 

 

 

But of people I've seen with large pools, it tends to be multimedia. TV shows, movies, etc. And I've seen a number of people that keep the uncompressed bluray versions of everything (which is quite costly in terms of disk space).

 

Though, photography is another thing. Raw images get very large, very quickly. Same thing with raw video. 

 

 

 

I would have had a 100TB Pool if I could just think what to store on it that made at least a little bit of sense. Boys, toys etc.

I only have 2 bays left on my 20 bay 4U enclosure. And ~87TBs.

Pretty soon, I'm going to need to start switching out drives and selling the ones I have, or to buy/build an SAS Expander case.