I’ve got alot of DVDs and have been slowly ripping, encoding, and tagging them and I’ve nearly filled my WD MyBook 1TB. I’m estimating that I’ve got about 1.5 or 2Tb to go to complete my current collection. I’ve spent alot of time on the files, and the peril they are in recently struck home. I had a second 500Gb MyBook that I was using, essentially, as a scratch drive, ripping raw Video_TS folders to them, and then encoding from there. It failed spectacularly a few weeks ago. I’ve convinced my wife that we need to redundancy, and she’s agreed (bless her heart!).
What are my options?
I’d like something in the 4-6Tb range to give me room to expand. Should I build a machine? Should I buy an off the shelf NAS? What are some good brands?
I’m not too worried about write performance, as I’ll be ripping to a faster drive and then copying once, but read performance should be pretty decent so I can stream video without any hiccups.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume a budget of $1500 US.
Solution:
I’d highly recommend a Windows Home Server (WHS) machine, such as a HP MediaSmart Server or Acer EasyStore Aspire. They are an excellent value, reliable, and very flexible (far more than even a ReadyNAS — you’ve basically got a Windows 2003 environment to work with). One of these with a set of TB drives would easily fit within your budget.
WHS doesn’t do RAID, but does provide configurable (and transparent) data duplication. With WHS, you can also mix and match drives and add/remove them on the fly, as with a Drobo. Honestly, RAID is just a bag of hurt in the home environment.
See a bit more info on the HP MediaSmarts in my answer here.