Since many of us keep a digital library of lossless and hi-res files, a discussion of ideas for storage is in order.
When I began the effort to rip my music to lossless to replace the mp3 files I had, I dreaded the day that I eventually run out of space on my data drive. With the storage limit approaching, and my increasing uneasiness about not having backup of 2TB+ of media, it was time to get off the external hard drive round robin and look into a NAS.
A couple of the IT and Web guys at my work used an unRAID server and were really happy with it. It seemed to be one of the more cost-effective and versatile NAS setups out there. Here's the site (go to the Wiki section for more info):
http://lime-technology.com/I kept an eye out on Newegg and Fry's for good deals on computer components over the course of a month and built one.
Components ended up costing me:
CPU (AMD A6) + Motherboard + RAM = 155
Power supply = 30
Case = 20
Flash drive to boot server = 8
Two 3TB drives = 180 (90 x 2 on Black Friday)
Pro license (optional) = 75 (if split with someone else)
So, around 470 overall and under 400 if you opt not to get a license at all -- free license includes support for up to three drives (2 data, 1 parity). Cost is even less if you already have hard drives laying around.
It has one parity drive, and the rest are data drives. All of your data remains backed up as long as no more than 1 drive fails at a time, and even if 2 or more drives fail, data on the remaining drives is still intact. You can choose which drives your data goes to, so I have my music on one drive and movies on another so I don't need the entire array spinning when I'm streaming music.
I'm fairly computer illiterate, but didn't find it very difficult to set up. Instructions were easy, and the GUI in the 5.0 version of unRAID is very straightforward.
There are some cool plugins that I haven't explored yet, including Squeezebox support and a plugin that converts video on-the-fly to an iPhone/iPad format (AirVideo):
http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/UnRAID_Plugins