The original Apple TV is $150 as of yesterday and you can get a crystal HD card off of ebay for $50 or less. Install XBMC on it and for $200 you have a slick, quiet, versatile media front end for your file server! (with a remote!)
I just built a Linux software raid server for my media. Its a mere ~7TB right now but it was ridiculously easy to setup and I dont know anything about Linux. I used Ubunut and the mdadm utility. Started off with 3 1.5TB drives and im at 6 now with 2 more waiting to be added. Making your array expandable is pretty important considering your media collection will only grow and the mdadm method seems to work very well.
If you were to get an actual expandable NAS (drobo, netgear ready nas etc.) you're cooked if the NAS itself fails. So far I have moved the hard drives between 3 machines and almost no re-configuration was necessary. I installed ubuntu to a 4GB flash drive, and have 2 SATA cards for the drives to make it easy to move around. The first installation was on a Pentium D 2.6GHz system but I realized I it only had a 10/100 NIC so transfers were slow. My second machine was an Athlon X2 7750 machine (with GNIC) and all I had to do was move the flash drive with ubuntu on it, and move the 2 PCI SATA cards and BOOM it booted up with the array mounted. Since it was a new network card I just had to share the array again and everything was back to normal. The third, and current, machine is a small form factor P4 small form factor PC (paid $80 for it) thats sitting in a closet at the back of my house.
To access the media I use a W7 desktop, WinXP laptop, a Macbook, a WDTV Live and a Mac Mini with XBMC on it. Everything works flawlessly and I havnt had a problem. I've written a step-by-step guide that I gave to 2 non-linux users and they were both able to setup without a hitch. Let me know if you want it and ill send it to you.
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The original Apple TV is $150 as of yesterday and you can get a crystal HD card off of ebay for $50 or less. Install XBMC on it and for $200 you have a slick, quiet, versatile media front end for your file server! (with a remote!)
I just built a Linux software raid server for my media. Its a mere ~7TB right now but it was ridiculously easy to setup and I dont know anything about Linux. I used Ubunut and the mdadm utility. Started off with 3 1.5TB drives and im at 6 now with 2 more waiting to be added. Making your array expandable is pretty important considering your media collection will only grow and the mdadm method seems to work very well. If you were to get an actual expandable NAS (drobo, netgear ready nas etc.) you're cooked if the NAS itself fails. So far I have moved the hard drives between 3 machines and almost no re-configuration was necessary. I installed ubuntu to a 4GB flash drive, and have 2 SATA cards for the drives to make it easy to move around. The first installation was on a Pentium D 2.6GHz system but I realized I it only had a 10/100 NIC so transfers were slow. My second machine was an Athlon X2 7750 machine (with GNIC) and all I had to do was move the flash drive with ubuntu on it, and move the 2 PCI SATA cards and BOOM it booted up with the array mounted. Since it was a new network card I just had to share the array again and everything was back to normal. The third, and current, machine is a small form factor P4 small form factor PC (paid $80 for it) thats sitting in a closet at the back of my house. To access the media I use a W7 desktop, WinXP laptop, a Macbook, a WDTV Live and a Mac Mini with XBMC on it. Everything works flawlessly and I havnt had a problem. I've written a step-by-step guide that I gave to 2 non-linux users and they were both able to setup without a hitch. Let me know if you want it and ill send it to you.