Beyond 5Tb Hard Drives

[WarioGF]

Hi guys, time to let the imagination & suggestions run wild!

I currently have 4 x 1Tb Hard Drives in my HTPC for storage & 1 x 500Gb drive for the Vista operating system. This pc is only used for playing movies & a few games. The 4 Tb drives store the movie libraries only, i.e. D:/DVD Library A - G, E:/DVD Library H - M etc. Problem is that I've run out of space & the motherboard only has 6 SATA connections (5 for the drives one for the DVD drive).

Where to next? Is there a cheap rack alternative for a Hard Drive farm & how is that setup? I realise I'm taking a risk not going to Raid but I find the restriction of Raid annoying in that it eats up so much disk space in redundancy etc & these drives really shouldn't fail with the little use they get playing movies.

So? What are you suggestions if I were to buy 3 or more 1Tb drives? NAS? I don't know of a NAS box that will take more than two drives? A separate server might work? Appreciate your input. Thanks

[davidgol]

WHS* is an option. Plus you get the benefit of a pseudo-RAID system that you can use for important files that you can't afford to lose.

side note: I read the other day that WHS2 (which is still under development) will most probably include all the media centre bits (which is what everyone's been asking for for a very long time).

*WHS = Windows Home Server

[WarioGF]

Thanks Davidgol I have a 120 day evaluation copy of WHS that I haven't tried yet but I hear WHS2 isn't far away. I was more asking the question on the hardware side of things to get some options on the best way to setup 8 drive (without using RAID). Any ideas?

[BladeRoNNeR]

Well I can see you have a few options depending on what suits you.

1) Get a SATA Controller card, or new Mainboard that will take more drives. Would need the case big enuf to fit more drives which can be an issue.

2) 1.5 TB drives I see are now on sale (not cheap tho)

3) External cases via USB, Firewire or eSATA

4) A simple RAID setup / NAS kinda deal.

5) Setup a server PC??

I have recently got a Drobo as discussed here which is now setup and works a treat. No setup of RAID just plug the drives in and away you go. These units support 4 drives, but if you were to use them in the Drobo you would then have space for more in the PC also for future upgrades. This does use some type of RAID but it is all handled automatically so as far as the user can see there is one big drive with the data redundancy.

There are also 8 bay units in NAS/RAID units but would require more setup.

Depends on your budget and requirements as to what is the best for your needs.

Cheers

[carll]

my suggestion nas
Network-attached storage (NAS)

they are a little expensive but you can scale it to what you want you want. you want ten drives you can have 10 drives, all you have to keep doing is adding nodes. You also have the added bonus of reducing heat inside you htpc, means you can have less fans less noise. by putting them in a raid array if 1 disk fails for what ever reason you dont loose you data and those hours and hours it takes to rip em in the first place

but the only problem is you have to have a decent network