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?

The main benefits of this are

• Convenience. It’s much easier to turn on the television and scan through a list of titles than standing in front of a shelf with your head turned sideways trying to find that elusive cover.
• Smaller Footprint. CD and DVD covers take up a lot of space when they’re organised on a bookshelf so people can scan through them. They take up a lot less space when they’re stacked in a big box in the spare room.
• Cool Factor. Enough said!

There are several products on the market that make this possible. The more technical among us do it with desktop computers and linux, while some others seem to purchase whatever is on the store shelf at the time.

I was never a fan of using a desktop computer, reasoning that it would look too out of place in the living room. Besides, I had to remember that I wouldn’t be the only person in the house using it, so it had to follow the KISS principal – Keep It Simple Stupid.

For many years, I used an original xbox that had been modified to run XBMC, an open source operating system written specifically for serving digital entertainment to the television. Being a games system, it looked like it belonged in the living room, and navigating the menu system was a breeze for even the most technically inept. The xbox solution worked flawlessly when it was properly set up, but upgrading to the latest version of the software was often “interesting”.

When the time came to move to a new country with different electricity standards, I decided to leave the xbox behind and loaded the movie collection onto an external hard drive. I’d worry about how to watch them after we settled in, and in the meantime I’d think about what I really wanted.

I performed a lot of research over the following weeks to try and find the best solution for our needs. I wanted something that was easy for my family to use, and didn’t require me to manipulate code when an update was released. I wanted something that looked like it was meant to be in the living room with the television.

When the decision was finally made, the winner was an Apple TV with 40 GB hard drive. It allows me to keep our entire entertainment collection in another room and stream it over the home network as we watch movies and television shows or listen to music.

The user interface is clean and simple, and the Apple TV looks just like a small white box; so small and inconspicuous that most of our visitors don’t even realise it’s there.

When linked to an iTunes store account, we can rent and buy movies straight over the internet, removing the need to store bulky cases at all. It also has a nifty screensaver function, turning our television into a massive digital photo frame when we aren’t watching a movie or television show.

This is part 1 of a 2 part series. In part 2, I’ll be looking at ways to store the growing collection of movies, music and television shows that we accumulate.