[Erwtbimp]

I was lucky and I purchased all my hard drives around September which was before the floods in Asia. I purchased 8 - 2T drives for $80 each using a coupon code and a special sale at Newegg. They're now going for $210 each.

I wanted to purchase a case that could hold all the drives but my lovely wife wanted a smaller media center that wasn't deep enough. So I had to purchase an external RAID enclosure for about $120 on a sale. It's a POS and I need to replace it. The best thing to do is just use a proper case that can hold 6 drives.

My external RAID 5 bay holds for drives (3 for date and 1 for parity) so it's 6T. Than my little case hold 1 2T drive for data and a small drive for the OS. I do all my ripping on my office PC because it just takes a some hands on time. Than I manually move the drive upstairs to HTPC and copy every couple of weeks. That way I have a duplicate of what's on the extra 2T drive making up the 8T total.


I had an old mother board, processor and power supply. Even with the $400 on active speakers, I'm under a $1k. Well worth it in my family since now my daughter watches movies that I select and never sees commercials. We don't have cable and I don't see us ever getting it now so we're saving $50 a month and the ability to have all of your movies in music at the touch of button, is worth it.

I figure in 2 years it pays for itself and it's so much nicer. I actually listen to music upstairs now where before I didn't because it was just time consuming to find what I wanted to hear and then I could only do 5 CDs at a time. Now the entire collection is there.

Here's a demo from a guy that builds the units and installs the software for you. I only use the movies, music and the photos.

Thanks Moby for the reply, I think I am going to look into this further, wasnt sure where to start but now i do.

Money these days just isnt what it used to be but this actually looks doable.