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I'm still rocking the HP Proliant N40L 4-bay AMD Turion mini-server I bought from Bman-1 here 3 years ago. Running Un-RAID (paid version) with four 2TB drives.

Un-RAID doesn't work like an actual RAID. One drive is parity, but the other three drives have complete files or folders written to them stand-alone. Un-RAID keeps a DVD movie folder with all the VOB files on one drive, for instance, so the VOBs aren't separated. Un-RAID writes files to the array in a manner as to try to keep all three data drives at about the same capacity, and then virtualizes shares across all three. This way the individual drives can be pulled and files read (if you lose a drive and parity worst case you've lost only the files on one drive), and it also keeps all drives spun down during reads except the drive you're playing media from.

Not a good NAS solution for data backup, but it's highly optimized for media playback.

It's been rock solid, with zero issues.

If I was going to put together another NAS I'd probably got with UNRAID again, and go with case that can hold 6 drives, although my current 6TB NAS is only half full at this point.

I have a Promise raid card in my old gaming machine that runs Windows 7 MCE. 4 3TB drives in RAID5. Since 90% of my home LAN is windows based, speeds are good, and no compatibility issues to worry about. Machine also runs sabnzbd, PLEX and sickbeard. System drive is 2 mirrored 500GB drives through the onboard raid controller.

It's been solid for 2 years now so I dont worry about it much.

I horde lots of video (as Pengo can confirm). LOL

Storage is 40TB usable: I have a Drobo with 8 x 4TB drives and a Netgear ReadyNAS with 4 x 4TB drives.

Viewing: We have a WD Live at each Smart TV. We can stream directly (wired Ethernet) from the Drobo & ReadyNAS, as well as from online stuff (Amazon, NetFlix, Hulu, etc..)

I have a box running 24/7 that's dedicated to downloading all TV & movies. It runs Sickbeard, PLEX & SABnzb. I sometimes use uTorrent through a VPN service, where every day I go through 1 of 20 different countries, just because I'm a bit paranoid. I also use VPN Watcher, which kills the uTorrent process if it sees the VPN drop.

I've been slowly shrinking my files down to more reasonable sizes after I've seen the movies, for archiving. Some of those BD rips can be huge and the 3D stuff are typically larger files as well, so I've been shrinking them down to MP4s as time permits, using Any Video Converter Ultimate (thanks to Pengo for pointing me to it).

Lets see. I have my file server and its running 5x1 TB drives raid 5 but It only runs once every 6 months now. It was replaced with a Thecus N5550 with 5x2TB drives. It runs all the time. It's a tiny bit slower then my old server but way better on power usage.

I have a Buffalo Terra station with my original HDDs from my first file server. Its only 478gig but its raid 5 as well and I use it only as backups for music, music videos and as a 3rd location for files I have created. It also is seldom ran.

I have a beige box that I added 4 extra drive bays to & strapped a pair of fans to the top panel. It's running a Sempron 3100+ (laptop chip=low power) with 2gb of RAM. Boot drive is a classic WD 10gb unit running Win7. I'm afraid to even check the number of hours on it.

As for the drives, they are 4 2TB in RAID-5 on an 3ware 9500S-12 controller with battery back-up & 1gb of RAM. I feel that I'll be going to 8 2TB drives soon because things are getting pretty cramped, but like Losbot, I've been trimming the fat where I can (crappy movies/TV series') and always seem to find a few extra GBs lying around. In general, the only time I have issues with streaming is when my main computer is automatically backing up. But that's only for a few minutes a day usually.

Netgear ReadyNAS Duo RND2000 With 2 X1GB Drives