HTPC scalability help

Hi there,

This is my first post but I have been lurking on here the last few months as I await my house to be built and the C4 to be installed. I see a lot of smart guys on here and I hope someone can offer me some help.

My setup is fairly basic compared to what I see from others on here. My question has to deal with serving media from a central location to multiple locations throughout the house. My plan is to have a drone PC that just holds my media (movies, music, photos) - all managed in Itunes - and to have Apple TV's throughout the house with the Extravegatables driver to link it all together. Simple enough I am told.

My question is more around the drone PC itself. As my media collection grows (I have a reasonably large blu ray collection already) I want to add additional drives to the PC and ideally have them all act as one drive.

For example - I have 5 X 1TB hard drives all connected to the same PC but they are all recognized as one 5TB hard drive on the computer. Obviously at some point I will not be able to add any more USB slots on the computer.

My questions are - is this possible? If so, how? If not, does anybody have any other solutions that might help me achieve the same result (a massively scalable solution at a reasonable cost)

Thanks in advance for any help or direction you can provide - even getting the right terminology on what I should be researching will be a big step.

Cheers,

J

Howdy

Buy a NAS. The alternative would be to get a RAID card for your PC, but a PITA. Just get a NAS and do it proper. It will cost less $$$ too.

HTPC here. 15TB of NAS and 4TB of drives in the HTPC. USB drives? No. Are you wanting to know how to distribute the PC or is this just another "should I buy a NAS" Q?

Thanks for the initial responses. I'll do some reading regarding the NAS and hopefully this will work. Is there anything special I need to know about how the media will be accessible or distributed?

Agree NAS is where it's at, but something like this could work for you too:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132016

I have a fairly basic setup for now as well. There are lots of good NAS options to fit any budget and they work great and will add up as one massive storage as you add more drives, which I think is what you're asking. I'm using a simple ACER Easystore H340 which can hold 4 2TB drives. I use mine to store all my video and audio and the C4 works fantastic with it. Right now I use it to stream audio to my master off my HC300 and audio/video through my HTPC running XBMC in my theatre. Obviously you can stream to other computers throughout the house as well. I also plan on adding an Apple TV or media player of some sort in my living room and master in the near future which will all pull from the NAS.

Nas for sure. Remember when you are trying to use any pc to distribute that it may not fulfill your desires. There are a lot of reasons for this but the main one is that the htpc or drone pc is constantly running processes that have nothing to do with media distribution. This can cause a host of quality and delivery issues.