I still think that it's a little early for archiving video libraries to a media server. I was basing my numbers on my own collection (actually aiming a bit under), and the 220 or so titles that I've accumulated since '98 add up to over 450 discs total (at least 325+ when you exclude bonus discs) - many of the extra discs are the result of buying TV shows, which is why the count gets a bit elevated. I also was keeping in mind the many links I've seen to people's DVD Profiler pages, where 200+ titles seemed a not-uncommon number. As for the 6GB figure, any dual-layer movie disc will probably use at least 6GB for the movie itself. With movies often running 2+ hours (~2:20 for the Star Wars prequels, 2.5+ hours for the Harry Potter movies, ~3 hours for the LotR theatrical versions, and so on) and a fair number of titles including both DD 5.1 and DTS, I think there are more discs in your collection that use 6GB+ for the movie itself than you think. (And I'm not counting titles with both widescreen and full screen, since I have almost no such discs in my collection.) Many of those TV show sets put four 42-minutes episodes on one disc, which requires a dual-layer disc (some actually use dual-sided dual-layer discs, which put eight episodes totaling probably 12 to 15GB on that one disc). We may be talking about a "simple" 480i format (not 480p), but the reason that they've been able to achieve such good picture quality on DVD within the limitations of MPEG-2 is making use of dual-layer discs to allow them to apply less compression. I still think that my numbers are not unreasonable - until both the cost of storage and the media server/client interface evolve a bit more, I think that many people are going to continue to hold off.

Also, one reason that a central media server with a separate client appeals to me is the ability to have that server somewhere out of the way and to have more than one client accessing the data (so that you can record CSI to the server on Thursday evening while getting the kids in bed and then be able to watch it either in the den or in the bedroom later). A media PC in the main system wouldn't quite get there unless it also supported a remote client, at which point it'll potentially be easier to put the server in a stock (noisy) case, hide it somewhere, and put a client unit in the equipment rack.

I think you'd be crazy to run RAID 0 on a system like this unless you've backed up to tape or some other format - a failure in either drive (something that will happen at some point) would wipe out all of your data. RAID 1 or 0+1 would be a safe approach, but mirroring means you'd need to buy four of those 500GB drives (that's $1200 just for drives using your link, before you add a system to put it in). RAID 5 is probably the most cost-effective and safe scenario, but I think the reason we see so many 1TB setups right now is because that's the cost threshold beyond which most folks aren't ready to go. For audio, the hardware and prices have reached a point where it's possible to put a CD library onto the computer. For video, I think it'll be a bit longer before it starts really catching on.

Boy, we've really hijacked this thread, haven't we?