Not yet ready to ditch your traditional home theater setup but still want the convenience of digital playback on your TV? Or maybe you intend to have multiple mediaserver boxes around the house and require some way to control and access your content from one place. In this case, an ideal solution is to invest in a media server. Don't let the word 'server' scare you though. You won't need a temperature-controlled room with a team of administrators on 24-hour shift. A media server is but a PC converted to act as a dedicated central storage library to backup and organize all your audio, video and image files.

Of course, all these goodies just sitting in storage isn't going to do you any good. What you want is to be able to retrieve this content from other PCs in your home or stream music and video to your Hi-Fi and TV. While it wouldn't be a problem achieving this by creating a LAN with other PCs and mediaservers, you can't really plug a network card into your home theater equipment. That's where a good media extender comes into play and we've got that end covered as well.

	Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 400GB x2 RAID Array  SRP: US$260 each We've not taken anything for granted here since a media server is intended to store your entire collection of video, audio and images as well. The P5GD2 Premium motherboard makes up half of this equation with its comprehensive storage support. The other half is of course the HDD drives themselves. With a five year warranty, it is hard to pass up on Seagate's newest SATA II Barracuda drives. Two 400GB behemoths configured in a RAID 0 array will give you the speed and storage capacity never dreamed of in a home environment a little more than a year ago.
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