After seeing the specs for Windows Home Server, I was very excited. However, the release date of 6+ months from now is worthless. I want it today, have wanted one for about 2 yrs now.
I’m looking for something that would:
Allow me to add any size drives
This way I could buy the drive at the best price point, on sale, or whatever.
Would not die due to failure of one drive
I have a lot of drives now, 1+ TB, over the past 3 yrs. Failures have started happening and losing all the data due to one drive is unacceptable.
Can be treated as one contiguous space
Almost all the drives are on the main box. Each with it’s own drive letter. That’s fine for 4 drives or so, but not for 10. I want one thing, massive amounts of storage in one clump.
Can be read by TiVo
The two TiVos are probably the best way to get video, the largest consumer of space, off the computer and on the TV. The TiVo app only pulls from one directory on one drive. That should be the massive “drive”.
Add drives over time
No matter how big it is today, I will find a way to make this puppy bigger. I’ve already built one that uses all IDE and SATA connectors. Next will be filling all PCI ports with hdd controller cards. After attaching USB drives. Then USB hubs+drives…
Remotely manageable
The idea of keeping this growing monster in the closet is great. No need for a keyboard or mouse except on setup. VNC or whatever should be able to configure it. Hopefully, it won’t need interference unless adding/removing hardware.
What would be stored on this? Backups in the form of Subversion repositories. And copies of certain files like downloaded programs, music, web purchased software, photos, system files, etc. Mostly, the largest consumer will be video from TiVos, DVDs, web, video camera, etc.