Forever Odd

My family has a lot of home movies on 8 mm tapes from back when my sister and I were kids.  My dad has talked about getting them taken off the old 8mm medium so that we could watch them as a family, however, he has never gotten around to having someone do that.  Since I had access to some equipment I was able to start transferring some of those tapes onto a hard-drive.

It is not a very fast process, for a couple of reasons:

• play each tape for the full duration of recordable content
• have to manually start and stop the process (the slower you are at stopping the more excess storage you use)
• have to also be present to swap tapes

The encoder I am using translates them into WMV files.  Now that I am gathering all this extra data that is very important to me, just the the loads of pictures I have, I am beginning to wonder how I am going to store all of it.  I currently have two external hard-drives which may have enough capacity left, however, then where will I store stuff later?  that leads me to believe that I am going to have to buy some more storage. 

The options I have come up with are to get another external hard-drive (or hard-drive and external case seperately) , however, that doesn’t allow for any redundancy, so I was thinking I should get something that I could set-up in a RAID 1 configuration.  I have been checking out network attached storage (NAS) systems, mainly the D-Link DNS-323, along with external hard-drives that contain two hard-drives in the same unit with mirroring.  For my purposes right now, that might be all I need, however, the increased functionality of a NAS set-up may be nice.

I am currently running the D-Link DIR-615 router with just wireless G (since my laptop doesn’t support N) at my apartment in Thunder Bay and a Linksys WRT54G at home.  Being a student funds are not exactly at my ready, however, I am not a big spender and have saved up a bit of money.  I still have some time to think about it and see how all of it will fit together.