I mentioned in a previous post that I would tell you some more about my media setup in our house, so I thought I’d take a few minutes and do that now.

In my living room, I have a Dell XPS 420 PC running Windows Vista Home Premium.  The 420 has two ATI Digital Cable tuners attached to it, in which I have cablecards to receive HDTV through Comcast, and a Blu-ray drive as well.  The 420 is connected to a Bose Lifestyle V20 home theater system.  I also have an Xbox 360 Elite connected to the Bose system.  The Bose outputs to a Samsung LN46A650 46″ 1080p LCD TV.

Upstairs I have two more Xbox 360s attached to LCD TVs in two of the bedrooms.  Each of these Xbox 360s have Linksys WGA600N Dual-band Wireless-N Gaming Adapters connected to them, allowing them to connect to my 5Ghz 802.11n network.  This allows me to not have to connect the TVs to a coaxial cable jack and place them where it is most convenient in the rooms.

The Xbox 360s in the bedrooms act as Media Center Extenders and are set to boot directly into the Media Center interface.  We can stream live HD TV, recorded programs, music and any other content stored on the network to each TV in the bedroom, even simultaneously.

As I’ve already stated on the site, I have a Drobo attached to the media center PC in the living room, providing a little over 4TB of storage for media.  The great thing about this system is that all of our media can be accessed from any TV in the house, whenever we want.  As soon as I manage to get all my DVDs ripped to the Drobo, that is.  It’s a time consuming process, but well worth it for the convenience it offers down the road.

I’ll be talking about Windows Media Center more as time goes on, including some of the plugins I’m using and some I wish existed.

The Drobo is very, very cool.  The only thing I’ve found so far that’s slightly annoying is that when you format your drives you have to tell Drobo how big to make the partitions, 2TB, 4TB, 8TB or 16TB.  Even if you don’t have that much hard drive space, you can tell it to use 16TB and Windows will see the drive as a 16TB drive, which can be a little confusing.  If you select one of the smaller amounts and then add more space down the road, Drobo will simply create another partition of the size you selected.

The other issue I ran into isn’t with the Drobo, but with the 1.5TB Seagate Barracudas that I bought for it.  Apparently there’s an issue with the firmware on the drives and it needs to be flashed.  While this normally wouldn’t be a problem, when using the drives in the Drobo you essentially have to pull all four drives out, unplug the main system drives and plug the Seagates in one at a time.  Boot from a boot CD, run the flash util, power down and do it again.  Not difficult, just a pain.  That will be my project for this evening, I guess.

I’ve just received word from SnarkyLady that my hard drives arrived this morning and that my Drobo should be arriving this afternoon.  So I’ll have some fun new toys to play with tonight.

Why do I need 6 TB of space?  Well, because Drobo does data protection I won’t actually get to use all 6 TB of that space, but I’ll be using it to store media on.  I have a distributed media system here in the house (which I’ll outline in a later post) so I need lots of storage to store all of our DVDs and recorded TV on.  It’s a pretty cool system that works really well, but it does suck up the hard drive space, that’s for sure!

After getting the runaround with both UPS and Amazon.com, apparently my Drobo and hard drives aren’t coming today.  One package Amazon says UPS picked up, UPS says they don’t have a record of it (fun, fun).  The other package, the trailer was late coming into the local distribution center so it probably won’t make it until tomorrow.

So, looks like it will be another day or two before I get the Drobo and can start playing with it.  Good thing I still have some hard drive space left to record my TV shows!

I ordered a Drobo yesterday from Amazon.com, along with 4 Seagate 1.5 Terrabyte hard drives to go in it. All the items are scheduled to arrive today, so I’m both excited and happy, since I’m rapidly running out of hard drive space here.  I’ll post more later about my setup here at home so you’ll understand why I’m burning through disk space so quickly.

I’m a tad concerned about the hard drives due to a lot of negative reviews on Amazon.com, but from what I can tell there is a new firmware out for them to fix the issues of those drives that have problems.  It sounds like drives that were newer in terms of manufacturing haven’t had the issues.  Unfortunately, those drives were the only 1.5TB drives I could find.

Once I get the Drobo up and running and use it for a bit, I’ll post a review.  Anyone else out there using a Drobo?