Maybe the mods here would know for sure.
He has no Internet access at his shop / office.
And I already have all these videos in this format, if I could just load some for him to watch, that would be awesome.
Hawkgirl70
I have a combo service with my internet provider in my area that I use is jointed with my land line telephone, internet and cable TV access. Last year after a major storm one of their lines went down and I lost access to all three services. I couldn't watch TV or use the internet for 3 days but I was able to use my DMS to entertain myself and my family. I was able to see all my wall posters and select them to watch what ever I wanted too. None of the wall posters were grey out and the DMS performed quite well without no internet access. Believe there is a cache inside the movie server that stores hard drive information that is sent to it. So under those terms, I would say if your husband does not have internet services at work he would be able to watch want ever movies you put on the hard drive, you just need to make sure that everything is updated under an internet connection before you unplug it and take it where there is no internet service. When power came back on after those three days the movie server went into and automatic re-scanning of the hard drive/library once it was reattached to the internet.
If you have a bunch of movies on ISO format then you should be able to pop those hard drives in the server and hit the ground running watching them. Hot swapping hard drives out the movie server is a different animal, not a fan how it works. I started out with a 2TB drive, that loaded up super quick, got to 279 movies on it before I started running out of room. The Movie Server can go up to 8TB max, would recommend going hard and get a 8TB HDD and and call it the day. Using two Segate 8TB drives in my unit now, Barracuda Pro and Segate Exos 7E8, the Exos my be overkill as it's used in NAS set ups to run 24/7, I just use it in the DMS and it seems to run hotter (like most I rarely turn my server off). Have two identical drives with movies on it as a back up as you noted since I do not have a NAS setup. I have 996 movies on both 8TB HDD with 4TB of space left on both, that's a lot a room to go considering.
One of your questions you asked was 'how do I get my ISO movies copied to another hard drive'.......tried a couple of things that I wanted a 1:1 copy of the HDD. Shared Networking and setting up a NAS system seemed to laborious with limited time available to give up for me. Here are some other options I have tried for making 1:1 copies of my hard drives.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KT3BEAS...ustomerReviewshttps://www.amazon.com/SATA-Hard-Dri...YS7SR8FNZHDFM7The latter two you will have to use windows drive management tool to extend the partition, it does a 1:1 copy but will partition your drive. All the ones with this set up puts a empty partition on your drive. It's the least expensive route. This one does a full blown 1:1 copy, no partition is much faster in copying, does so much more but at a premium cost.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1A last note, if you manged using your ISO file under your PC, think you would be more comfortable keeping that set up then formatting under the movie server, there's nothing wrong with letting the movie server format your hard drive but if you don't like the limited leverage of not being able to pop the HDD out and see the context on your PC, formatting on your PC to start off is the way to go.
