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I don't mind replacing the drives, so I'm more worried about mean time between catastrophic failures. Which, right now, seems to be about 6 mo. for me.

I've poked around some more, and may end up with a Dell PowerVault 775N. It's enterprise grade, but maxes out at 4 x 250 GB drives; with RAID 5, that gets me only 0.75 TB, but that should hold me a while. Would be nice to have the hot standby, but I think my solution may be to get a spare drive and have it available...

I did look at the Lacie NAS, as well as others by Snap and Weibe...

Ed-

I may be headed in the same direction... I had been using LaCie 250 GB drives, but just had a disk crash on my second data drive that wiped out 300 CDs or so. I had gambled that I'd be OK through the ripping process, so it wasn't backed up--was going to do that when the disk was done. Even worse, I went ahead to back up the first data drive, about 2% of the data was generating CRC errors.

I am now thinking that the external drives for consumers currently available really aren't ready for prime time. At least not 24x7 operation and having people actually use the capacity that is available.

I was thinking about the Buffala terastation, 1 TB (700 GB w/RAID 5) due out in Feb., but I'm totally losing faith in consumer storage. If this thing is built around Maxstor consumer drives, it just may not be worth it in the end. So... I had previously checked with Dell and was looking at $14K for 1 TB of NAS RAID 5 storage. That doesn't work. I briefly looked at the $3K Niveus 1 TB media server but, again, I'm guessing its built on consumer hardware. So... I'm now looking at an xServe w/3x400GB drives in a RAID 5 configuration.

Is that where you ended up? Have you used your xServe with Windows devices (most of my 'puters are WinXP)? Did you go with the cluster version or the normal one? Any help would be appreciated...

Oh yeah, one more question...

How quiet/loud is it?

Holy god. At least now I have an answer when people tell me I've gone overkill...

I'm thinking of the xServe G5 w/3x400GB drives and the RAID card. Should give me 0.8 TB of actual storage configured as RAID 5 for about $5K. Of course, I can only lose one drive without losing data, but I think the LaCie drives will be OK as standalone backups (as long as I never turn them on and never need them). Should be good enough for pics and 1500 or so CDs. I needed something in the way of a standalone network device, however, so don't think the xRAID works for me. I think--tell me if I'm wrong--that won't work as a standalone network device.

Turns out the cluster thing is irrelevant, I really just need the xServe. Anything else fun I can do with this puppy once its hooked up?

At this stage, I've had three drive crashes in less than two years--one internal Western Digital, one Maxstor external, and one LaCie external. Add in CRC read errors and 2% of the data being unrecoverable on a fourth Lacie drive, and it makes me think I'm taxing the limits of normal consumer technology. While I agree that the xServe offers excessive processing power for a dedicated NAS, its the cheapest RAID 5 storage unit that is intended for a 24x7 commercial environment...

I thought about the fact that I could get five of the buffalo terastations for the same $ as the xServe. But, it's still leaving me feeling kinda exposed. Maybe I'll change my mind tomorrow (today was the day that 300 CDs painstakingly ripped into WAV format disappeared)...

What else do you use your server to do? I had previously ordered a miniMac that I was going to attach to the main stereo/video rig to run iTunes and get WAVs off the xServe. I've also got an elgato eyeTV 500 on order and will see about recording some off-air HD onto the server. But, the server is still acting like NAS...