Add drives to HTPC or a bluray burner

[waymon]

I am wondering what the community thinks of this. So I built a HTPC this last summer that has 6 sata slots. Right now I have 3 used by drives and 1 used by a dvdplayer.

The 3 drives are
1-37gb raptor system drive.
1tb - movie drive
1tb - tvshows drive.

Now im wondering if I should keep adding some hard drives first or invest in a bluray burner.
I have so many completed series on my TV shows drive that I was thinking I should burn a 50gb bluray disc with; for example, all 10 seasons of 'Friends' to 1 disc, print out some nice coverart and throw it on my bookcase.

Or should i just buy some 2tb drives and just keep adding them up.

I run boxee on my system, but I wouldn't mind having the single disc on my bookcase instead of taking up hard drive space.

Is buying a bluray burner practical right now or should I wait even another year and just keep buying hard drives?

thanks

...waymon

[chrispycritter]

Probably a lot easier and less expensive to use hard drives..duel layer Blue Ray blanks are about $20 a disk and even in bulk of 10 or more over $15..single layer are around $4-6 a disk in bulk..then you have to do all that burning when everything can be right there on your computer..if your case runs out of space you can always go to bigger hard drives as you run out of space or add externals...

[waymon]

Adding externals is out of the question since my htpc sits cleanly under my tv. Right now im leaning towards adding hard drives, I just don't like the fact the a hard drive could die at any moment. Burning it makes a final copy for me.

[chrispycritter]

Adding externals is out of the question since my htpc sits cleanly under my tv. Right now im leaning towards adding hard drives, I just don't like the fact the a hard drive could die at any moment. Burning it makes a final copy for me.

The Blue Ray burner is cheap enough I just saw one for $169 at TigerDirect..it's just the media and time cost I wouldn't like..my 1st computer had a DVD burner in 2004 I found I hardly used it except for backup really now I backup to hard drives though..I probably wouldn't use Blue Ray burner much either.

If you could find a spot you could use a hard drive dock and just plug in hard drives when needed once you run out of slots in your computer..you could always replace 1tb hard drives for 2tb ones as needed..I'm sure in the not to distant future you will start seeing 3,4 and 5tb hard drives for a reasonable amount in the future look at the link below Hitachi says they are releasing a 5tb drive this year..someday SSD's will catch up too.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/hitachi_harvest_5tb_hard_drive_2010

As for being safe it's always a good idea to backup anything you feel is important..Blue Ray disks and drives can fail too...

[waymon]

The Blue Ray burner is cheap enough I just saw one for $169 at TigerDirect..it's just the media and time cost I wouldn't like..my 1st computer had a DVD burner in 2004 I found I hardly used it except for backup really now I backup to hard drives though..I probably wouldn't use Blue Ray burner much either.

If you could find a spot you could use a hard drive dock and just plug in hard drives when needed once you run out of slots in your computer..you could always replace 1tb hard drives for 2tb ones as needed..I'm sure in the not to distant future you will start seeing 3,4 and 5tb hard drives for a reasonable amount in the future look at the link below Hitachi says they are releasing a 5tb drive this year..someday SSD's will catch up too.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/hitachi_harvest_5tb_hard_drive_2010

As for being safe it's always a good idea to backup anything you feel is important..Blue Ray disks and drives can fail too...

Interesting. I was wondering this because I thought with the current hard drive technology 2TB 3.5 drives were as high as they could go. I've thought about the SATA docks, im sure we are all trying to get the same thing. Being able to access any tvshow and any movie from a remote on our couch.

[shamoun]

i think its interesting you mentioned that the hard disk could die at any moment. I am not sure about blu rays but from my experience with optical media degradation can be quite an issue and will probably happen faster than it would take a modern drive to fail. if you are gonna be using blu ray media I recommend you do some research to which brands are best. as far as previous optical formats go i only buy Taiyo Yuden media, they might be a bit pricier than other brands but their quality is incomparable to any other brand.

If externals are something you are interested in and you don't have the shelf space for it you could consider a NAS device. I stream 1080p quite comfortably from my NAS over 802.11n with 135 mbps. I stream uncompressed blu rays from my NAS to another PC via gigabit lan which works perfectly.

As it was previously stated in this thread, hard disks are quite inexpensive at ~10 cents a gigabyte in many cases and get you alot more value for your dollar since they're not only significantly cheaper but you're not going to be burning say... 18 gigabytes to a 25 gig disc and losing that additional 7 gigs for organizational purposes. its also really nice to have all your stuff in one place via something like Windows 7 libraries or XBMC or the like so you can browse all your content from your couch.