I think we should really break this up into a discussion about sub 500GB collections and 1-2TB Collections and IT professionals versus Home users.
Different solutions work better.
Sub 500GB.. Direct attached Performance USB (slowest)/Firewire (Faster)/eSata (eSata ROCKS!!!)
Sub 500GB.. Removing the noise from the room using a NAS
There are a couple of single and double drive NAS's that are cheap but transfers to them and from them are slow but for listening to music this is not important. Some even support 2 drives for Mirroring (Raid 1)
Edesilva: +1 for a NAS solution as he has a large collection.
I could build a PC or use on of my old ones but as soon as your collection reaches a certain size other options make sense. Stuffing 5 drives into a PC case suddenly generates a lot of heat and requires big slow moving fans and isolation and a REAL Hardware RAID CARD $300+ not one of the built-in motherboard controllers that is a software raid card. (3ware is the company to go with for raid cards)
NAS - Advantages:
Newer Buffalo Terrastations have faster processors and you can get the 2TB (or 1.5 in Raid 5) from www.newegg.com for under $900. You can add more ram to the Buffalo and performance will increase. If you run it in Raid 0 speed will increase if that is important but then you need another backup solution which as has been already recommended is a requirement (last thing I want to do is rip another 1000CDs again lossless, my time is worth more)
Thecus N5200 ($640 from Newegg) plus Drives is the solution I'm looking at because it supports 5 drives! (Since raid 5 takes one drive space away for parity)
Yes it costs as much as a PC, but buying a real raid card costs almost as much as the Thecus. The Thecus N5200 uses under 100watts of power versus a pc with a 500watt powersupply. This unit uses a Celeron M 600Mhz Processor (a single jumper can make it run at 800mhz) and can be upgraded from 256 to 512mb of ram. It has gigabit and it is 2-3 times faster than the Buffalo plus has a eSATA interface on the back for backing it up or expanding it is critical for me. I have an external 1TB eSATA Case I will use to backup my NAS and eSATA is smoking fast! The unit supports Gigabit Jumbo frames. I plan on starting with 3 750Gig drives (being pulled out of my Noisy fileserver) and using the expand function (of course while backing up to a bunch of smaller external drives periodically) to eventually hit 5 750gig drives (for 3TB of storage) which should let me do my whole collection.
Another advantage is not having to patch an OS every month, pay for OS licensing, Antivirus licensing... No one ever mentions the $140 for a software OS license. I already have 4 PC's at home and don't need another one to patch each month and this NAS is going in a Closet in the guest bedroom on a UPS (remember if you are running RAID of any kind that PC or NAS had better be on a UPS (battery backup) unless you want a power glitch to corrupt your Raid (Recovery services$$$)
I intend to use the NAS as a central data repository for all my machines so my video content (Media Center), my 100gig of digital photography (grows by 20gig each time I shot my Digital SLR), and all working media documents are centralized and backed up on a schedule. This way all my PC in the house can have single drives to reduce noise, risk of data loss, reduce heat in the case and generally reduce my headaches of finding things.
Performance comparison of the Buffalo, Thecus, and Infant NAS
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/29616/75/1/8/
The Thecus is 2-5 times faster than the Buffalo in Raid 5 Gigabit due to the faster processor and design.
This site has some excellent articles on NAS versus build your own. The latest Thecus N5200 Bios Updates have fixed a lot of the problems discussed in the article since they reviewed the earlier one, but Infant has superior support compared to Thecus which you have to use the support boards. But once the unit is setup and working this is not a constant battle. Some of the smaller Thecus have iTunes support built in.
The interesting thing about all this is that the latest stuff almost requires the users to have some IT background, due to home networking, Permissions on SANS or remote servers, Backing up criteria, Configuring network cards and buying routers/switches that support jumbo-frames.
NAS's are typically Linux and require some configuration so if you aren't Techy, this might not be the right option.
Home built PC's once again might fit a price point but not necessarily an easy, quiet, or self maintaining solution.
MAC - Quieter, Lacking internal storage capacity (except for their high end machine$$$$) Require externally attached drives via USB/Firewire and some sort of backup process to additional external drives. Currently can go to up to 1TB of external storage for about $400 without raid (maxtor sells a 1TB two drive external drive) but these external chassis will be noisy. So wireless (Squeezebox, Sonos, Airport express) might require relocation of the machine out of the listening room.
I love the immediate access to my music collection and this causes me to listen more! So all this hardware is still cheap compared to the cost of my music collection or even a couple of cables..
