After a few months of pretty much no action on kitting out our home recording-studio with what's required, today the family sat down and we're finally making progress.

My brother is the guy who's sorted out all the recording kit (which includes pro-tools and a mac) so my tech stuff is more or less on the periphery.  This suits me, as not being in the country 75% of the year means I probably wouldn't be able to support it anyway.

The only thing I've been asked to do is to create a home NAS, for both the PCs/Macs/Ubuntu boxes around the house, and also for much of the material we're going to be recording in the studio.

I had a little chat in the #ubuntu-uk room, with the idea of building my own server, and just having plenty of diskspace and the ability to expand it.  However, with me not being in the country, the idea of letting others shut down the PC and play with a RAID card isn't particularly enticing.  Looking at other options, I took a more detailed look at the drobo.

Drobo, you look awesome.  In fact, it does look too good to believe - but the main drawbacks I have with it are price and scalability.  I'd need a droboshare to put it on the network, and the price of the empty chassis with the droboshare is £388 on amazon - which is pretty borderline.  If it extended to more than 4 disks then it'd be a no brainer.  I love the simplicity of the device, and the whole family appreciated the ease of use when I made them watch the little promotional video.

I even took a look at the drobopro, but that's £939.12 exc. VAT which is just too much, given that max capacity is 16TB.. will I need more than that once people start recording loads of samples to disk.. I'm not sure.  That's why the expandability options of the drobo appeal.

However, I'm a big ubuntu fan (as I hope you know by now) and surely there's got to be a way to do it myself, and use a chassis which enables hotswappable disks - even if I have to log in remotely to add a new disk to the storage.  I'm not looking for a budget machine, as this is probably going to hold some pretty important data - but what's the best option.

I'd love to hear a few peoples views on this, so please leave me your feedback in the comments.   Andy