[malte]

just to be clearer, when I mentioned the term redundancy I was referring to OP's redundant 1:1 backups. I believe what you are saying is that a Parity array(whether software or RAID controlled) is not as safe as 1:1 redundant backup and that I should not compare the two when it comes to the safety of data.

Maybe I was wrong when I picked up the term redundancy. I was talking about RAID vs. backup. It does not matter if you operate your system with RAID 1 (1:1-redundancy) or RAID 5 (with parity drive).

The poster question seems to be more related to whether he should continue to keep saving media to his external drives and continue 1:1 backups or go for an NAS.

I think the discussion is not NAS vs. backup. The initial question was to replace the main external hard disks (not the backup disks) with an NAS.

When it comes to performance and the best use of his drives, especially when it is just media, IMHO, NAS w/parity would be a better option. The chances of more than one drive crashing concurrently in a Parity NAS is very unlikely.

As said above, I am not talking about drive crashes. The chances that you accidently delete data or that you loose data because of bad written software or maybe malware are higher than a HD crash. And if you accidently delete data it will be deleted on all parity or redundant drives. Thats why you need a backup additionally to your redundancy. You are right, it is just media and most of us won't need 1:1 backups for it. But if you count the time that alot of us spend with downloading/ripping/renaming/sorting/decorating our movie collections it may be worth to have it in a safe place

What I think is not necessary is RAID in a home environment. I personally use a file server (HP N36L) without RAID but I have a 1:1 backup of all my data on an external drive. If one of my NAS drives crashes I have to order a new one and when it arrives I restore all my data from backup. Of course, in the meantime (2-3 days) I can't access the media that was stored on this drive. So, in worst case I have to read a book