Question to some of the storage pros Options

[Harkonnen]

I've decided to get this 4-bay drive enclosure or the cheaper non-raid variant.

The most cost-effective thing I can think of is to fill it with four 1.5TB WD Green power drives, running independently for a total of 6TB (5.5TB NTFS).

Or run it in RAID5 and fill it with four 1TB enterprise/raid-edition drives for extra speed and data protection. However, I've heard RAID5 isn't fool proof on rebuilds and having nearly 50% of the space seems like a huge tradeoff. (I'd need to get 1TB drives as I've heard the WD green drives don't work in RAID and I'm never buying Seagate again).

Thoughts? Any opinions would be great.

I don't really need speed so much as space and protection.

[HardwareBoB]

Generally the best thing to do is either have a storage server or run your desktop as a server for your videos. Your player then connects to this over the network. Failing that, I'd go one step up from the enclosure you've specified and get a little NAS, which is the same thing, but you can just mount it using windows filesharing.

Really that is going to provide you all you need, and handle the >2TB stuff internally, rather than you having to worry about it.

I would also recommend getting over your seagate issue, as *all* hard drive manufacturers make dud batches of drives, and all hard drives fail sooner or later, it really doesn't matter. That's why you should use RAID and get drives with decent warranty.

In summary: get four drives and put them in RAID5 in a NAS enclosure, this will provide victory.

for my setup, I'm currently running 5x1.5tb seagate drives in RAID5 on my server in software raid in linux, haven't had any problems.