This is part 2 of a 2 part series. In part 1, I looked at ways to watch the movies, music and television shows stored on our computer on a standard television screen.

More and more people are now storing music, movies and television shows in digital format and watching them directly on their television screens. However, our quest for large collections also requires another, perhaps more important, quest – more hard drive space.

Knowing full well that my temporary setup for moving countries wasn’t going to work for much longer, I started researching my requirements. I decided I needed the following to be happy.

• To have a complete backup at all times. This is fairly self-explanatory – I wanted an additional copy of everything, just in case. I’ve suffered losses in the past, leading me to be quite particular about my data.
• To limit the amount of external drives hanging off my computer. When I consolidated everything to move countries, I needed almost 1 terabyte of space. That essentially meant I was going to need at least 2 additional external drives to expand, including a backup drive.
• To not restrict the use of my main computer while someone was watching a movie. My main computer is a notebook and I like to utilise that by working from different parts of the house. I would be restricted to one place if I was streaming a movie at the same time.
• To have plenty of room for expansion. These collections can grow really quickly, and I wanted something that would last a long time without needing to be reconfigured whenever it got close to filling up.
• To use the system at any time without needing to set something up first. This would allow family members to easily use it without needing me around to start it for them.

In short, I needed Network Attached Storage (NAS) with RAID capability that could stream iTunes. Unfortunately, such a beast either doesn’t exist, or just wasn’t available within my budget. There are a lot of acceptable NAS devices on the market, but none that could effectively stream iTunes without a computer.

That wasn’t really a drama because I had an old laptop that wasn’t being used anymore, which meant it didn’t need to be network attached. The laptop could be used solely for running iTunes, so all I really needed was a giant RAID hard drive. I researched available solutions for a long time before choosing the Drobo by Data Robotics.

The Drobo is a single unit that accepts up to 4 hard drives, giving me a maximum of 16 terabytes of storage. It has enough redundancy built in to allow me to remove a hard drive and add a larger one without losing any data, meaning that I can easily replace any drive that crashes or fills. The green lights on the side tell me how healthy the drives are, while the blue lights tell me how much storage is available.

The Drobo connects to the laptop running iTunes using just 1 USB cable. They sit unobtrusively in a corner of my study just working away without required any human interaction other than the occasional laptop reboot when Windows updates itself.

The redundancy also means that backups are taken care of; at least for the short term. Ideally, I still need a method of storing a duplicate copy offsite, but I still don’t have anything in place. I like the idea of using an online backup service, but don’t like the idea of taking weeks or months to download that much data should it be required. Maybe a second Drobo is the answer?