[nickr]

If you want something cleaner, grab an old desktop - pretty much anything will have the horsepower for what you need here.

Then you can cram hard drives into it as you get them, and it never gets messier. Have it run Ubuntu Server LTS, MySQL, Samba, etc.

That, anyways, is my approach.

Then, after you get more drives, you can use one of the assorted drive pooling filesystems like AUFS or mhddfs to pool your multiple disparate drives into a single filesystem.

Also, when you have more drives, you can look to software like SnapRAID to have parity protection, all at the cost of nothing, without ever needing to build arrays or anything like that - you can add or remove SnapRAID freely at any time.

I'm a huge fan of this route, because it allows you to have one ideally low power desktop in a closet somewhere acting as a server. Once they're set up, you don't need a keyboard or mouse; just forget about them. Maybe install Webmin to have a very easy web based management interface.

It's surprisingly cheap to do. Mine's running on my old Phenom AMD desktop, and has been for years. I restart it maybe once a month after installing security updates. When I start running low on space, I grab a HDD on sale and cram it in, add it to the pool and forget about it.


Then use the NUC and Raspi for HTPC's

Good post. If I hadn't been on my phone for my last post I probably would have said all of that!

I bought an older HP workstation with lots of SATA ports and space, and I use mhddfs, I share only two folders, /mnt/movies and /mnt/tv. Each of those is an amalgamation of partitions on multiple disks. It also runs a mythtv backend.