looking for HDD advise

[namehater]

hey everybody im currently looking around for a new hard drive, i need to upgrade because my two 74gb raptors just arent enough space anymore, i bought a canon hd camcorder a few months ago, and im gonna start transfering my video to pc, but i want to maintain the great quality, anybody know how much space i should get? im thinking somewhere around 500gb, for starters at least

i havent decided if i want internal or a network drive tho, i want to be able to stream to my xbox via network, so that is another issue, if its a network drive then i would think it would be faster to stream than if it was an internal pc drive, anybody have some insite for me?

[Crippler]

You may want to look into setting up a NAS (Network Allocated Storage). Basically, it's a tiny HDD enclosure typically with 2 bays. You can throw 2 HDDs in there and set them up as Raid 0 or Raid 1. Whichever you prefer, data protection or speed. One HDD also works fine. The NAS would be wired into your home network and would be accessible from any PC or 360 on that network. I have actually been looking at this for my home network, DLink DNS-323. Throw one 3.5" SATA 500GB HDD, or two, in there and you got some sweet storage space. Newegg has the best deal on those that I have found so far. You can also set-up a FTP server on the NAS too. Which means you, or family members, could have access over the interwebs to all of your files. That's pretty cool.

As for an internal PC HDD, you probably wouldn't notice a diff. in streaming speed between the two. I like the idea of the NAS simply for the fact that I don't need to have my PC on 24/7 and I don't have to have a resource hog, media server running either.

Overall, the internal HDD will be the cheapest solution. The NAS would give you more flexibility.

[WormholeXtreme]

I have a couple of 500GB NAS drives from Buffalo, they are great for storing things but no replacement for an internal drive. Certain things are much faster with an internal drive like burning a DVD. And I'm using a Gigabit Network.
You might want to look at the new WD 750GB drive with perpendicular technology. It's the first 7200 rpm drive to meet or exceed the Raptor data transfer rate. Newegg had them for $200 shipped a couple of weeks ago. With that drive you get the speed of the Raptor and much more storage space. ALthough it's slower for random access(because of the slower rpm), but I don't think it would be that noticeable. I had bought a couple but ended up putting one in my TiVo and I'll probably put the other one in a TiVo also. I have a 150GB and 35 GB raptor in my PC plus the NAS drives so I have plenty of storage.

[lovekeiiy]

I was looking into a NAS storage not too long ago. I like the ReadyNas system. Pretty flexible. Newegg.com has the best deals on it. It has a pretty small footprint. One of my buddies' coworkers uses one and seems to work very well.

For more info on it, check out: ReadyNas NV+ link

For what I want to do, I would rather use a home server. I'm waiting to see what M$ home server OS turnsout.

[Crippler]

Nice one. I've never seen that ReadyNAS. I'm sitting on the fence too for Home Server. It's sounds really cool and I love how easy they made it to add storage to it. Hopefully HP gets that box out into the market soon.

[lovekeiiy]

From what I read and heard about the ReadyNAS system, good alternative to using a home network server.

I think Mircrosoft's Home Server is still in beta testing right now. I suppose to be released in the fall. It's suppose to be really easy to use (as Microsoft says with all it's products, LOL). Probably not too bad, but like anything else, should have some learning curve to it. If it doesn't seem to work well for I want, I guess I can always use the Linux based server OS and go from there.

[namehater]

well, i decided that im just going add a new hard drive to my pc, i did a little testing and even with a wireless network, i can stream Hi-def beautifully to my xbox, and a 40min video was roughly 7gb, now i just need to decide how big i need to go, i actually expected it to take up much more space than that so i dont have to go near as big as i expected, im thinking 250gb for now