Over the last week, I’ve been building out a larger scale home media server and have come to a final ‘decision’ to make.

Here’s some background: In the past, I used a pretty simple setup - an Asus Pundit with a 120GB hard disk served up music, photos, a few videos and acted as a central ‘backup’ for critical files. This setup enabled me to shoot content over to my Tivo, the home theater (running Media Center) and to a UPNP DVD player upstairs as well as distribute audio through out the house (I had the box’s audio out plugged into the structured media panel which distributes audio to several rooms).

Over the past week, I’ve built out a new server which has not only the 120GB from the previous machine, but 4 200GB drives that I’m planning on using for a ‘DVD Jukebox’. Using My Movies, I’m planning on storing my DVD’s online.

The ‘critical’ stuff (photos, files) is always backed up to an external drive every week or two already.

Here’s the question: Do I set up the 4 drives as one large drive (RAID-0) giving me around 750GB of storage, or do I go RAID-5 which will gain me drive parity (in case one of the drives fail), but also drop my storage to 570GB?