Pi Drive!

I'm still playing around with the Raspberry Pi. I stick to the '3', there isn't a big cost savings using the earlier models and there's a big performance hit. Plus all my cases and other accessories are guaranteed to fit.

My Plex media server project is coming along. I just found out yesterday that my daughter has another 20 DVDs for me to rip, but once that is done I should be in good shape. As it stands I have about 780GB of data, requiring me to abandon my plan of using an SSD (too costly) and switching to a standard laptop drive.

Standard 2.5" hard drives have SATA interfaces, and the pi natively only works with USB drives. So you need a USB-to-SATA adapter, which are pretty common as they are used in drive upgrade kits. But Western Digital recognized an opportunity and created a 2.5" drive with a USB interface called the "PiDrive". I picked up a 1TB version for about $55 (way cheaper than an SSD).

Since the USB interface is 2.0, it takes about 15 hours to copy all the data to the drive. I'm waiting for my stackable case to come in so I can construct the finished product. I've hooked everything up for testing and I can stream HD videos to my Xbox One via the Plex client (which is free!).

What I am discovering are problems in the ripping of some movies. Mostly it's the case where multiple version of the content exist on the DVD, some with annoying commentary. In these cases I have dig up the disk, re-rip it, then update the image on the drive. I've only see 3 or 4 of these issues, but I'm concerned there could be more, I have no way of knowing without previewing a large sampling of movies.