I am looking at a rebuild of my setup at the moment, and storage is one of the issues I also keep vacillating on.
I am after a lot of space as inexpensively and simply as I can, to link to 3 pcs and some WD TV Live media players. I don't need RAID, as I can use USB drives on a shelf for the backup option, and I don't need uber fancy (I don't see it as needing to stream more than 2 video streams, likely only one, and I won't be transferring material onto it at the same time it is coming off. At the moment it will mostly have to handle a large archive of SD material, but HD will increasingly be stored and streamed as well. One of the WDs will be wired, the other will be fed wirelessly (due to cabling complications). All I really need is a cheap, large and comparatively dumb storage pool attached to a network.
I have almost settled on the Lian Li EX40 NAS box (4x SATA bays) that Ascent is selling for $450NZ. Initially it will hold about 3-4TB of material on 2 discs, and provides headroom for the collection to grow as it will hit 8TB when I fully populate it with drives.
Quite a bit simpler and lower power than the HP server cldlr76 references, although obviously not as capable either.
Not sure if you noticed or not but that Lian Box doesn't come with drives so you'll have to factor in another $100-$150 per TB unless you already have drives you can throw at it.
Yes, I noticed that. I plan to put in one or two 2TB drives to provide me the space I need, and populate the other two bays later on an "as needed" basis if storage needs keep growing.
Seems simpler and cheaper, albeit not as flexible, as going the Windows Home Server route.
Will be on the back burner for a month or two though - question of available time more than budget.
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