What is the best home solution?

[SpeedFreak]

I am faced with three possibilites at the minute:

1. Build a home server and install WHS, making the computers in the household clients.

2. Buy a NAS of some description, Raid 1+0 for redundancy

3. Build a FreeNAS system to do the same.


All I really want is centrallised redundant storage that can look after all of our pictures, stream HD movies and audio to my htpc and is reasonably robust against failure. I like the idea of having each PC as a client with my profile centralised, meaning that any pc I log on to will be as I want it, but how would this work with a media centre and XBMC?

Would NAS be a better option, and if so, FreeNas vs an off the shelf unit, which is better?

God this is confusing lol!

 

[mdjmcnally]

WHS isn't really meant for use with RAID.

It likes the Drive Pooling where you just store information on a Drive Pool of drives, fill up the pool and add another drive into the pool and it will start to use that.

However even a RAID system isn't sufficent and you should still make a backup of any data that you want to keep.

WHS however will be the easiest to implement on what you want to do apart from the resilient storage, however you can cope with this through a regular backup to a USB External Drive. (You would have course be doing this even with a RAID system in place)

WHS doesn't give you anything that you couldn't achieve with a NAS box or FreeNAS and tinkering with Windows XP/Vista, what it does is remove the need to have to do the configuration yourself.

Why would your MediaPC and XBMC be anydifferent to the other PC's?