Storing Media Files

Does anyone know if you can set up D7 so that you can choose where all the heavy Media Files are stored?  Our hosting company is asking if we can set it up so that the Video, Photo, Music files can be stored on a separate hard drive or server separately from where the core site is, this might also speed up download steaming and such, anyone have a solution?  Would be nice if it were an option in the admin area, especially for sites that are getting really large.  Any insight?

Hosting company is asking about this again, anyone know if it's possible? if not, can we all bug boonex to have this option in the next generation platform.

Edit: see deano92964's post below.

On a seperate drive, yes, but not a seperate server.

Paths to the media files can be changed in inc/header.inc.php

Dolphin will use whatever paths are setup in there.

So in theory you could point all of the media folders to a mount point of a second drive.

Actually i forgot about NFS on Linux. So yea, even a different server through NFS mounts, but that would slow things down.

thats a good idea...  never thought of doing that but i dont see why it wouldnt work...

So what would be the best way to do this.  We are on Linux, we are have about 50gigs of data, would be move the current files to the new location?  the current media should still work, correct?

Are you saying that an external hard drive is better than another server for this?

Thanks for the advice, this has been a question for a long long time.

As i look at this closer, the main config file only contains paths for the images, not the ray media files.

So i would have to dig into the ray config files to see if it could be done.

But to do it your server administrator would need to know how to mount drives and what dynamic links are. If they don't then they should not operate a server.

Anyway, paths can be moved and the config adjusted to point to that new path, but the other thing that needs to be dealt with is the url the web server uses. That would remain the same, but what once was the physical directory would be replaced with a dynamic link pointing to the new location and the webserver needs to be able to follow dynamic links.

This will not really be a piece of cake to setup, but should be able to be done.

I am supprized your server administrator could not figure this out. Any decent server admin should be able figure this out.

Anyhow, i have not played with the ray config files enough to be positive it can be done. I will have to do some research.

As for what would be faster. A second internal drive would be the fastest. NFS over a gigabit ethernet might be fast enough. External drives might be to slow depending on what type of connection it uses.

There is also advanced technology like iScsi storage arrays. Which is am not going to get into. I don't know enough about it.

_bump - revisiting this to see if anyone has seen or has a solution to this.

 He gave you a couple of solutions.  Does your host need him to draw it out with pictures and cute little cartoon characters?

Yea, sorry, i have been so busy i have not really had the time to fully research how to make it happen.

mydatery - are you just trying to stir stuff up with people on this site again?  :) I wanted to revisit this subject because if you read the entire thread in the last post before my bump deano92964 posted that his prior solutions are not going to work and that he needs to dig into it a little deeper.  So yes we are back at square one till we can figure this out, which would be nice. If you have a solution to this that would be helpful, you seem to know what your doing with this dolphin platform, would you by chance have a solution?  And yes a little stick figure cartoon illustration would be nice :)

deano92964 has the right idea, even if he did not do the best job expressing it.

This is what you need to be doing.

http://www.ubuntu4life.com/node/30

Your just not moving your /home folder.

My site is located at /var/www/dolphin

The folders with the largest media files are in /var/www/dolphin/flash

As for RMS, you would be better off having that on a different server.

Don't accuse me of stirring stuff up.  What Deano said was he'd have to look at the ray part to see about those files.  He didn't say a thing about the non-ray items, which we still have plenty of media for.  What DTSpace, you want someone to go in and do all of this for you from step 1 through step 50 and then provide it to you for free?  It's alot of work to ask someone to do for you, when if your having this problem it must mean your site is so successful that it can pay someone to do it.

I made a simple comment that the basic idea was provided already and either your host or yourself should be able to figure it out from there.  You want a little more detail?  How's this:  Use an SQL Load Balance on a server cluster and it will solve your problem.  Do a search in Trac for Load Balancer and you'll see that Boonex worked on this along with HFW and certain dolphin sites and it was all figured out and provided for you, just for you, and for noone else but you.  It's tested and it works quite well.

No, I'm not going to run the search for you, you can do at least that much.  Gawd knows that I've done more than my share on this topic already after getting attacked without any type of provocation by you. 

Still looking for a solution to this, anyone have any insight?