The Quest Begins!

I have a theory that virtually any invention that I can come up with that is technologically feasible has already been created. All I need to do is find out who makes it. Two years ago, when I completed my movie room, I knew that I would want a system to play all my movies off of a server on to my projector and all of my TVs.

The other critical factor is cost. At that time, hard drives were somewhat more expensive in dollar per gigabyte than I really wanted to spend. I knew that the storage costs alone wouldn't justify creating a server for myself.

Predictably, hard drive prices have fallen, with terabyte drives (1,000 gigabytes) now selling for about $100. Assuming a standard definition DVD is compressed to 5 gigabytes, as it always is on my backup copies, than I can store 200 movies on a single terabyte drive, at an acceptable cost of 50 cents per movie.

As time goes on, the price will fall even further, yet I will likely ad many more high definition, Blu Ray movies to my collection. Those will be about 25 gigs, or about $2.50 for the storage space at today's prices. I expect hard drives prices to fall rapidly in the future, making high definition storage costs less expensive current standard definition costs in the next four years.

There are several other factors that mitigate the storage costs ballooning out of control. First, I will only be using my media server to......serve media.

The archiving of the media will still take place on physical discs. Since physical media, such as a blank DVD, can be had for as little as 10 cents a disc, it is still cheaper than hard drive storage. Also, if I can keep the DVDs away from my toddler, I don't have to worry about the destruction of the media in the way I would a hard drive failure.

I also realized that it was not necessary to keep all of my media, especially my movies, on my media server at all times. If I watch a movie, and I have it backed up on physical media, there is no reason why it has to consume hard drive space on my server forever. If I feel the need to watch it another day, I can always reload it. If I had my favorite 100 movies, and the last 50-100 DVDs I watched on my media server, that would be more than sufficient. As hard drive prices inevitably plummet, it will be cheap and easy to expand the capacity of my server.

With these assumptions, I realized my vision for a media server was now technologically, and economically feasible, I just needed to find the correct solution.