Graham1982: Hi:
This is a kind of related question but not really. I do not really want to start a new one as it is not relevant to the forum as a whole. At present I want to create a budget but decent media centre in my flat. I have my PC attached to my Avant for watching movies and want to get a large HD rack for the storage of movies perhaps using the program you suggest to catologue them.
I do not know the specific name for this piece of equipment but I shall describe it:
It is basicly a cabinet for a number of IDE or SATA HDs in which you bolt internal HDs (in my case, ones from old machines that have no other purpose) and then hey-presto you have a cheap storage device. My friend has one made by a company called Icy Box but he bought it from the US when there - hence no import taxes. In the UK you can only buy cases wih single or two HD slots and I would like one with at least three or four. Does anyone know where I could get such a thing or is there a cheaper alternative - buying an old server off Ebay. I know very little ofservers and their storage medium so any help would be good.
Thanks
Graham
A RAID array... like Apple's Xsan?
A costly way of doing it, but it'll work. You'll need a server to go with it - which is where things start getting expensive.
Lacie are now producing 2TB external hard drives (with Firewire and USB). One of these + a MacMini or iMac + an Apple TV would be pretty cheap, and work brilliantly. The AppleTV is an absolutely brilliant Media Centre (and competes with anything else I've used, despite it's £199 price tag).
You can RAID array external hard drives together, producing many TB of storage. The iMac has a Firewire 800 port, allowing you to 'daisy chain' multiple Lacie Big Disk Extreme+ drives together to produce many many TB of storage (you could probably get up to 10 TB before things would start to slow down, although this would be pricey.
I store all my media on a 750 gb Firewire 400 drive, connected to a MacBook Pro and streamed to an Apple TV. Best media centre I've used...