I'm currently reviewing how much storage I have and how I'm storing my data.
Currently it's spread over various different drives, internally in my PC and on various external HDD's and portable drives as well as USB memory sticks.
This quite honestly un organiszd way of storing data is now driving me to distraction and thought it was time I stored in one place.
I was looking to just buying a NAS box and then putting my HDD's in that but the ones that take more than one SATA drive seem quite expensive, and buying a ready made job usually comes with a drive (although perhaps cheaper than me building a dedicated PC for this task) but if I buy a NAS drive then I have no room to put it next to the router, so that then leaves me with a wireless option but seems even more expensive again.
If however I were to build a dedicated PC for the job that means I could have any amount of drives in there (case depending) although I am looking at an MATX build in some form of small form factor case which means I could only install 2 drives inside it but I could then attach my 2 TB WD My Book Essentials drive to it. I'd also be able to keep it tucked away in my room without it taking up too much space.
Currently in my PC I have 4 HDD's, 1 WD 1TB Blue (mymain drive) 1 Seagate 1 TB LP (6900 RPM, also stores all ym music and movies etc) a Seagate 500 Gig, and a Samsung 500 Gig F3 drive which I use for all my steam games once downloaded.
I've seen some MATX stuff go quite cheap on various forms recently, wouldn't need to be anything overly powered, I should think a low end core 2 duo or even a low end Athlon 64 would do the job.
At this moment in time I am favoring the dedicated NAS PC but that said I am more than happy to listen to opinions of others. Not looking to spend a great deal of money on this project and would be quite happy to source the parts second hand.
Although not sure what I'd do for an OS, I do have an XP Pro license spare although again will be happy to listen to other suggestions.