Song/Photo Storage

I've been considering different ways to handle centralising the (digital) storage in the house. With a number of machines in daily house (ie desktop plus portable each) it would make a lot of sense to keep stuff we both need access to in one place. The main things this means is the music and photo collection.

Up to this point the music collection had been on one custom machine (Orsino - currently being rebuilt) connected direct to the hifi - but I've been experimenting with streaming it from a dedicated store instead. The photo collection - which when we get round to scanning all the old pictures will be large - is scattered over separate machines. Part of the problem with photos is they can be large and so if you're doing editing or even browsig you don't want them to be accessed over a slow network. But since we're going up to 54Mb then that won't matter so much.

So bearing all that in mind a NAS (Network Attached Storage) box seemed like a good idea - especially once I discovered that one of the UPNP servers I've been using to stream music from (TwonkyVision) can be installed directly onto some of the NAS boxes (they're mostly just embedded Linux so you just need to hack your way to the root password) - giving a completely PC free solution.

The LinkStation 250 looks like the best choice. It's pretty good value for money, is a good amount of storage, can be hacked and has 2 USB ports for adding external drives if you do run out. I'll probably order one next week and see what happens.