Need advice on serving up media on home network

[Hansen]

I'm trying to determine which is the better approach for making photographs, music, videos and documents available to all computers on my network. Use my desktop PC, which is always on and has 1 TB of drive storage, to serve up the media, or buy a HP EX470 media server that acts as a network storage and server running Windows Home Server to do the job. I have 2 Vista 64 bit PCs and 1 XP PC on network.

Thanks for all advice.

[funhouse69]

A single point of storage is your best bet, how you achieve that doesn't really matter as a "Share" is a share. The only concern that I have is data security / fault tolerance. I would strongly suggest a system with RAID 5 or even 6 and as an added bonus an online storage to back that up.

I currently have over 10TB of storage on my network split between two different RAID 5 systems. One is my Video and the other is the rest (music / documents).

Hopefully this helps, I've posted several HTPC (Home Theater PC) configs here. If you have any additional questions let me know.

[AlbertZeroK]

I think the bigger question is how are you going to access the media you share?

I use Zyxel Media Players. Yeah, I know, not the norm, but they work and they work well. Little anoyances here and there, but the video play back is awsome and hey, nothing is perfect.

I personally have 18TB of Parity RAID (half RAID6 with a real hardware raid card) the other half is a backup and is Software RAID5 (Thanks Vista Ultimate.) We have put our entire DVD Collection (many crates) online now and it ROCKS!

[Hansen]

What if I just share the files between computers on the network? Which method in my original post is best? Such as sharing photographs and iTunes music library.

Thanks for Raid recommendation.

[phat78boy]

I would suggest the HP Windows Home Server. I have one myself and highly recommend it for anyone looking to share files between multiple points, backup multiple computers, and have remote access to all of your computers and files. Yes you can do all that many ways, but Microsoft really did a good job with their WHS product and for a one stop solution, it couldn't be any easier IMHO.