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I've been using a RAID5 array for media storage as well. It works, and it does the job! But your biggest problem is, as stated before, drives failing to spin up. Generally, RAID5 drives are running 24/7. Actually this isn't too bad because spinning up and down does a lot more damage to the drive than running 24/7. But the drive may silently fail. Compare it with an old refrigerator. Typically those devices can work for up to 20 or even 30 years without any trouble. Switch it off and on and it's dead.
I 'fixed' this by having my server reboot every monday at 5AM. But the biggest problem is expandability. You can't just order another 2TB drive because you will have to rebuild your RAID array. In the meanwhile you need to store your data somewhere else. There's your problem with a 10TB array.
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I second the Unraid recommendation.
Only Unraid (and I guess Flexraid) allows you to mix and match disks of different sizes into a single array, and only Unraid allows you to sleep disks when they are not in use.
Considering the difference between consumer HDs and enterprise HDs, these two features of Unraid put together means you won't suffer disk failure from a bad HD batch (as you SHOULD mix up disks and vendors) or from overworking the disks (since they will sleep like they expect).
Unraid is basically the perfect media server software. The only downsides are that you can't really do much else on a Unraid server (its add-ons are much more difficult to work with than say WHS), and that it costs money. But if you serious about a dedicated server then you should look past these limits to find a really nice solution.
I don't work for Unraid by the way, just was very happy to finally find a storage solution for mortals that works (and no, RAIDZ doesn't count on that list!)...
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Very cool...
yeah at this point I think I'm going to research the UnRAID setup and see what thats all about. Really I just want one massive storage area to store all my current movies, music, TV shows, and pictures (roughly 1.5TB at this point. Then start ripping the 200+ DVD's I have to the NAS as well. I will certainly compress it down to 4.7GB/ea as I'm not too much of a picture quality snob *yet* (once I'm a bit further in my career, have bought a house, and put my media room together THEN I'll be all about high quality. Until then I'll just be stoked to be able to access ALL of my media via XBMC without having to go through racks of DVDs!!) So I'm thinking about building my own custom case (I learned how to fiberglass last summer, built a couple sub boxes etc. and this might be a cool project for that?) or repurpose something into a case just for fun, then start with two 2TB drives and build from there as I need more space. Of course it'll need to have 10/100/1000 capabilities (which means I'll have to buy a switch since my WRT54G is only 10/100 and I'd like to put this together in my closet.
Anyways just researching now but hopefully soon I'll get the plans and $$$ together and post up what I build.
Thank again all for the input, very helpful!