I decided on the Gigabyte P55A UD6 because I wanted the maximum internal componentry for SATA connection. This board has 8 of them, 2 of which are SATA3. One for the boot drive (Vertex Turbo SSD, which I flashed up 2 firmware levels – much easier to do before installing OS!), one optical BD drive, one 2TB main drive for recorded TV, and 5 drives for saved videos.

I’d had some prior experience with RAID and have been fairly unhappy – the implementation of RAID-0 just did not justify the risk of complete data loss for marginal speed increase. RAID-1 gave internal mirroring, but at the cost of space and speed. RAID-5 might have been a go-er except that I have been reading that in the event of a single drive failure, the likelihood of the other drives rapidly following suit is quite high. RAID 10 didn’t suit, again complexity but definite lact of space.

I wanted bang for buck, so formatted 5x 2TB drives under GUID and connected them as JBODs. I’ve then used my Drobo-s for a Sync-toy backup.