I've had my media center PC for almost 3 years now.  I have quite a bit of movie clips, videos, MP3's, and pictures from the last few years as wells a a copy of most of my office files that i carry on my laptop. 

 The media center has 250gb's of hard drive space, and a bay for another 160 - 300gb of removeable storage that can be connected as a USD drive on other machines.  With only 5 gb free space left, time to look into options.  The cost of an additional drive for the media bay is 200 bucks. 

Up unitl this point I have been using 250gb external drives to backup my main drive in the event of drive failure.  The process takes some time.

I have been looking into home flavors of the RAID box.  Netgear has one that they have been selling for a year or two that can hold two drives and supports mirroring.  Cost of the Netgear box with no drives is about 100 bucks.   

 I recentl saw the Buffalo Terastation at best buys for 399 for the enry level model.  The Terastation .6TB model has 4 160gb drives which comes setup as a RAID5 partition providing 480gb of storage.  Under RAID5 I could loose a drive, and my data will still be OK.  The Terastation suppport relication to a second Terastation which would provide a redundant copy of the data on the array. 

 Another cool feature is the ability to take USB attachable drives and use them as additional RAID storage.  This is real cool since I have 4 250gb hard drives in USB/firewire cases that I can connect to the Terastation to create a second RAID5 array.

Hardware wise the processor and mother board has more than enough power to perform the fnctions of a NAS.  The box is about 8inches high, 6inches wide, and 10 inches deep.  It's very quiet and has an array of busy lights ot let you know what is going on with the unit.   There is a serial port to connect the box to a UPS and allow the box to shutdown off UPS power once it gets a signal from the UPS of a power failure.  The box runs off the Linux operating system.

The operation of the Terastation is pretty simple.  You can create filespace for folks and give them controlled or full access to it.  The box supports FTP functions so you can get to your data from anywhere on the internet.

The only thing I did that was unconventional from the instructions in the box was use a crossover cable to ransfer my data at a very fast rate.  The default IP address of th Terastation when you first turn it on was 192.168.11.20.  I connected a crossover cable to my computers network card and gave the card an IP address of 192.168.11.30.  I made the default gate way for each IP address the other interface end.  This allowed transfering my data at 100mb copper wire rather than using wireless.  I could have connected my PC to the router, but the router is on another floor.

So what does get me.  Using RAID5 reads are very fast since 4 drives are involved in reading the data.  Writes are faster than the speed in my PC, but not as fast as the reads using 4 drives due to the system having to write the parity info thats used to regenrate faild drives.

Other features are it can be used as a file server, print server, and FTP server as well as a point for PC automated backups to go to.

Videos and Audios are very smooth with no frame skipping at all. 

There is a web sit for the terastation of folks who started a forum to furthur expand the capabilities of the box.

Here's some tech info and some pictures.

Message to "NAS".  I know you may not approve of this box for some reason or another.  But I'm a network security auditor for a X company that collects XX billions of dollars per year and based on my professional insight in enterprise security, I give this box a thumbs up.

Here is the box and where it sits on your home network.

Here are some RAID options

Media info

Here is the front of the box

Here is the back of the box