Phx-Suns.Net

I currently have an eSATA box plugged into my desktop PC, but that's kind of limiting as I can't tinker with it or turn it off if someone is watching a movie or something.

Been trying to figure out a NAS solution, any of you guys using one at home? Right now I'm debating whether to build my own with spare parts and use something like freeNAS or just buy a QNAP box and use it. QNAP would be simpler but more expensive, inverse would be true on rolling my own.

I am using a netgear one. I mainly use it for backup between my laptop, PC and wife's computer. It works well. I don't use 20% of the features, though.

How many drives? I've currently got 7TB of drives in my 4 bay, considering going with quad 4 TBs to do RAID5. I don't have any redundancy right now.

I only have two 2TB HDs as clones of each other. I don't have that much stuff on my hard drives. It is basically our family pictures, and the music/movies we have bought digitally, then our key documents.

We have all that and about 250-300 Blu Ray and DVD rips for the home theatre PC.

Because you don't want to put them in a player?

It protects them from little hands and we also have a full screen interface on the TV to select a movie and it begins playing.

Looks like this:

Got it. Looks cool.

We almost never buy movies anymore. We just don't watch them more than once.

It does get annoying when I order my kids a movie and it's on Netflix two weeks later. On the bright side they do seem to churn their content quite a bit so there's no guarantee something will always be there.

Threw some spare parts in a box and am currently running FreeNAS off of a thumb drive. Machine has a mix of old hard drives, a 650GB IDE, a 300GB SATA and a 250GB SATA. Nothing super high speed, just a 2.13GHz Core 2 Duo with 4GB of DDR2. Streams quickly enough for HD video and shows right up as an SMB share. I'll give it a whirl for a while but it might just be a reasonable alternative to a QNAP box. Will need more/bigger drives to get full use out of it though.