Is it already time to update my home media server?
A few months back I wrote a lengthy (and rambling) post about my attempt to transition from physical copies of media (DVDs) to streaming.
It’s still working out pretty well for me, but as you might imagine my hard drives are getting pretty bloated. My 1.5TB “movies” drive has about 50GBs left (probably 30 movies) and my 750GB “tv shows” drive is down to about 60GBs.
The TV Shows drive has me more concerned because if I want to add a new drama program, that is usually about 11GBs per season.
The lack of space, and the general annoyance of having to connect and manage so many drives for my various backups, has me seriously considering a NAS (network attached storage) solution. Unfortunately even the most basic ones are pretty pricey, so this is going to be a tough call.
It seems that the most appealing solution is a Drobo. Unfortunately the unit alone costs $350. To fill each of the 4 drive bays with drives of a worthwhile size (1.5TB) will be another $440 $500. Then if I want to realize my dream of storing it remotely (in a closet on the other side of the man cave) I’ll need to shell out another $200 to add the ethernet option (drobos only support USB, Firewire, and SATA out of the box). UPDATE: I’m now hearing that the DroboShare is even more crap-tastic than Comcast services.
So, if it’s not already obvious by how much I’m considering spending on data storage…I have clearly lost my mind.
