Digitized VHS Home Movie Archive - Europe

[december]

Hello,

Thank you for reading my first post here. I've read a number of old posts and the guide. I hope this doesn't duplicate anything.

Intro:
My family is about to embark on the digitization of a home movie collection of 200 VHS tapes. The digitization will happen in the US and I would like to setup an archive at my place in France so my family doesn't have to manage the long-term storage. My budget is around 2000 USD/Euros total. With prices generally higher here than in the US this will be a challenge I think.

Storage needs:
I'm told the video will take up 35GB/hour in compressed lossless format. I calculate a total between 13TB and 17TB, plus another 2TB for my current storage needs. I plan to review the output files and cut unnecessary footage as time permits, so I hope to stay in the lower part of that range. I also want to try to keep backups fitting on single disks if at all possible.

Here is the plan so far:

In the US:
I'm thinking a RAID1 direct attached external enclosure with two large drives to capture the tapes to go between an old Windows machine and an M1 Macbook. Recommendations?

In France
A NAS with the following config:
OS - TrueNAS CORE
ZFS config - Encrypted
MoBo - Supermicro X11SSL-F - Used - 151.98€ shipped

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CPU - Intel Core i3 6300 - Used - 45€ shipped

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Cooler - Stock Intel LGA1151 E97378-001 - Used - 26.65€ shipped

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Thermal Paste - Arctic MX4 - New ~15€ shipped
RAM - 16GB Micron DDR4-2133 Registered ECC 288-pin - Used - 39.18€ shipped

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OS Disk - 1 or 2 256GB Samsung 870 EVO SSDs I already have.
Case - Supermicro 731i-403B - New- 173.40€ shipped

Supermicro 731i-403B - Boston-it

www.boston-it.fr

~450€ Total

UPS:
I haven't looked yet. Any recommendations for a budget unit in France/Europe? I assume APC brand based on the guide?

Backup Drives:
I've read it's best to not use USB with ZFS so I'm thinking of two internal drives on a rotation to an offsite location.

Hard Drives:
I've used this calculator https://wintelguy.com/zfs-calc.pl to run a few ideas. For the NAS I'm thinking raidz2 with 4 12TB drives, or 2 18TB drives in a mirror (but that could exceed the ZFS 80% limit). Here in France, the lowest cost €/TB drives with 5 year warranties that I can find that are also shipped by Amazon (I hope this will increase the chance of getting drives covered by warranty) are these Ultrastar DC HC550 18TB for 340€ shipped currently: https://www.amazon.fr/WD-Western-Digital-Ultrastar-HC550/dp/B08DHH8V9P
The 12TB drives are more or less the same price per unit (but they do seem more legitimate). My inclination is to roll the dice on the 18TB units, check the warranties on the WD site when I get them and burn them in. The other option is to wait for Black Friday / Cyber Monday.
Is there any way to bring this cost down? The margins on shucking seem slim to nil here. Maybe 4 new ~12TB drives from the US for the NAS itself would be cheaper? Warranties won't be available really but I can probably buy 4 for about 1000€ to have redundancy. What would be the best way to get them from the US? eBay?
So, to recap, right now I would buy 6 18TB drives in total. 2 for the NAS, 2 for backups in France, and 2 for the DAS in the US. That would be about 2000€ just for the drives.

Transfer data US > France:
Either using syncthing or rsync or similar software to pass the files over the internet, or go to the US with the France backup drives to copy the files and seed the NAS sneakernet-style.

Closing:
Thank you everyone for your time and assistance. I hope everything is clear enough. Let me know if I left anything out!

 

[danb35]

It seems to me your storage requirements could be reduced greatly by using a lossy, but still high-quality, codec for your video. For example, I'm seeing suggestions for about 2 Mbps for SD video with h.264, which would result in about 900 MByte/hour. At the expense of some processing load, your storage requirements could be reduced by a factor of 35 or so. Is it essential that a lossless codec be used?

 

[december]

Thank you for the research and feedback. It is a lot to store. Realistically, I think we'll end up deleting some videos, saving a lossy, edited version of many, and keeping the lossless originals of some. My thinking is current and future upscaling technologies may work better with the lossless versions. Plus I doubt anyone will want to watch every hour of footage in the future. That editing and compressing process will take time but if I do it within a few days after capturing I think I could probably get by with "only" 7-10TB.

 

[Ericloewe]

My thinking is current and future upscaling technologies may work better with the lossless versions.

Here's the dirty truth: Upscaling is a fancy word for "making things up".
Here's another dirty truth: You will hardly find anything that does any sort of upscaling of images that have not already been compressed.
Here's where it gets even worse: VHS is a miserable format. Don't let 335x576 pixels deceive you, because the color is at around 40 columns of resolution. And we're not even entering the realm of noise, non-linearities and all the other fun analog things.

I'm told the video will take up 35GB/hour in compressed lossless format.

Are they sampling the unmodulated PAL output coming out of the VHS deck at 5 times the Nyquist Frequency? Because that's what 35 GB/hr is.

DVDs are often under 1 MB/s, and you'll surely remember how big an improvement that was over VHS - despite the crappy late 90s compression. Sure, you might correctly say that we're not under the ideal conditions of mastering a commercial DVD, the source is crappier and we don't want to make it worse than it is. Still, we're a far cry from 35 GB/hr even if you quadruple the bitrate for good measure.

I get it, my OCD says "lossless is better", too, but there is a meaningful barrier beyond which there is nothing to be gained.

Now, for some server commentary, which is what we're here for: Only two comments, the rest looks good.

RAM - 16GB Micron DDR4-2133 Registered ECC 288-pin - Used - 39.18€ shipped

You can't use Registered DRAM with LGA 115x systems. You'll need unbuffered.

Case - Supermicro 731i-403B - New- 173.40€ shipped

That's a rather old-school chassis without any real benefits over many similar-sized, cheaper "consumer" chassis options. It'll work, but I'm not sure it's a great option. I guess the price includes a reasonable PSU, which drives down the cost, but I'm not sure it would be a great experience, noise-wise or cable management-wise.

 

[december]

I'm still learning about the details of VHS capture but I agree with your general point about reducing file size. I may have to wait and try different ways of reducing bitrates of the captures before deciding on the final drive sizing. I'm thinking of something like 4 or 5 4-6TB drives now.

Thanks for the RAM tip. How about this Hynix stick? I think it's unbuffered.

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Also good point on the case. What about the SilverStone CS351 or GD06? They're the smallest cases I can find that support 5 data drive and 1-2 boot drives. I think they would fit much better in the small apartment too. I also like the idea of hot swapping backup drives into the case because I read ZFS likes working over SATA instead of USB. Pairing that with perhaps a used Seasonic Focus Plus 400W+ PSU.

Finally, is there a good PCIe to dual SATA card for the boot drives?

 

[Ericloewe]

Thanks for the RAM tip. How about this Hynix stick? I think it's unbuffered.

Looks fine, but I didn't check the QVL to see if it's on there. Haven't really heard of many issues with X11 boards and DDR4, so it's not too critical if it's not there.

GD06

Maybe a bit small? No real experience on my end, but worth researching before buying.

What about the SilverStone CS351

Looks good if it can keep the drives cool. Some of these chassis have been known to have difficulty cooling disks, so definitely research before buying.

Finally, is there a good PCIe to dual SATA card for the boot drives?

Simple answer is no. You have a couple of options:

1. NVMe SSD. One is easy, since you have a x4 slot, two might get more annoying. It can be done, but it starts turning into a hassle.
2. NVMe SSD over a USB-to-NVMe bridge. These are actually decently reliable, easy to acquire, and overall a decent solution. You can easily get one in with the USB Type-A port on the board, two with a USB 3.0 header adapter.
3. Combine one M.2 SSD on a PCIe slot adapter with a second one attached via a USB-to-NVMe bridge
4. Get an LSI SAS controller. A lot of extra power just for the boot drives, but if you're going to add data disks beyond the six SATA ports, then it should be there anyway.