I have a dedictaed htpc in my tv cabinet that now has 4 hard drives. 3 2TB drives and 1 1TB drive. I use XBMC to display by tv and movie libraries and on occasion I use the computer as a web browser as it has Windows 7 installed. I also use the system to play games like the orange box, fallout, COD etc etc. I continuouslly run into issues due to my media library spanning 4 drives (I will be requiring a 5th very shortly) and I was wondering what the best solution would be. I would prefer to not have to lose the data I currently have and seeing as my case will only support 5 drives in total I was wondering what solutions people would do in this scenario. Should I RAID the system, get a new base pc with 8-12 hdd bays and connected it over the network, combine hte drives using windows 7 built in disk management? Help on this would be terrific as I am stumped but I do understand any solution will require me to purchase new hardware and Im fine with that.
What issues are you running into ? Running out of space on individual drives ? Performance problems ? Do you have a logical drive spread across multiple physical drives (W7 calls this spanning) ? I used to run a central fileserver with my HTPC accessing it across a 1Gbps connection, even then there'd be noticeable lag between pressing play and actually getting a picture on screen, most of my library is 720p, you wouldn't have this problem with SD material. So now my HTPC is also my central fileserver and it's tucked away out of sight. FWIW my own setup is similar to yours except my machine can take six internal SATA drives and I don't use it for gaming. My partition maps look like this Drive # Label / Purpose Size 1 C / Windows system 50GB 1 D / Windows backups 800GB and static media (ie collections that won't grow such as old TV series) 2 E / Pagefile 4GB 2 F / Spanned storage 1859GB 3 F / Spanned storage 1863GB And all the other drives are laid out the same as drive #3 they're just part of the storage pool. I wanted to keep my Windows installation separate from my main data, it helps a bit with performance and it's a bit more secure. Unfortunately W7 wouldn't let me use the rest of the drive as part of the pool. I'm forcing W7 to use the second drive for virtual memory, I'm not letting it manage those settings itself, again a performance boost. If you decide to go down the fileserver route then I'd recommend Linux as the O/S for that box, its logical volume management is just so much better than Microsoft's, it's more robust, flexible and faster, and XBMC looks just as good under Linux as it does under Windows. Having said that, 7MC is the best HTPC package available at the moment if recorded and live TV is important to you.
