[acantha]

Setting up a home XBMC system has kicked my storage problems up from "on the horizon" to "Thats no moon, thats a space station!". I've dug around the forums a bit, but i'm not finding any immediately apparent answers to my specific queries.

I am currently running XBMC on a HTPC, with all my content stored on my ubuntu server. I've got about 2.5 tb in there now, but i'd like to add another 2-4 tb. The questions i have are as follows:

1. My server is running out of a 3-4 year old tower. Is there a risk of power failure if i stick 4x 2tb drives in there?
2. is there a compelling reason to go with something dedicated like a QNAP nas over loading up my home server with drives?
3. what do people generally do for back up of these things? external drives? tape? remote?

thanks much

[kurai]

1. Very little. Power consumption numbers for drive hardware have generally gone down over time, even while capacities, densities and transfer speeds have increased.

2. Not really. Most of the consumer level NAS products are at a price premium for non tech savvy user simplicity. If you know how to build and configure a home server it will be a cheaper option and have much more scope for expansion/flexibility/functionality.

3. These days it's a lot cheaper to use external drives to backup super-critical stuff occasionally and keep it in a separate location. Remote is also a good solution if you aren't bandwidth limited and your critical data set is of manageable size. For less critical stuff that you still want some level of protection for most people just add in some extra local drives for desired level of redundancy (RAID/filesytem flavour of your choice).