I'm planning to have it as my main musical collection, so I'm gonna have to do a RAID, but I have no idea how to set one up, but I could prolly figure it out.
FWIW, I think RAID is overkill. Consumer RAID devices are not as reliable as pro - controller failures are more likely, and recovery is less dependable. I'm actually kinda sweating my cheapo SATA RAID card right now. One of these days I'll turn off the RAID and switch over to an automated nightly sync. Unless your data is changing a LOT over the course of a day, I think an
automated nightly sync between two drives is easier and safer. That's what I did for my second pair of drives and will continue to do for drives I add to my system.
At this point I only have about 6gb of flacs on a 40gb hd, but I'm gonna be purchasing some larger HDs within a couple days, I'd imagine. I've lived through hard drive failure before, and it totally blows. IT was actually way worse than HD failure, b/c I didn't notice that it was failing for quite a while, so a lot of my early flac masters are corrupted on the optical backups, becuase the source on the HD was corrupted...
I remember the thread about your corruption problems. Sucks! At any rate, no better time than now, is what I figured. The more data you acquire, the more effort it will be down the road. I loaded ~400 GB of data from CD/DVD backups onto my HD system. PITA. And it sounds like you have all the core infrastructure ready - network, wireless, etc.
I'm still not really following the use of the ethernet input as a digital input... As it stands right now, I have a cat5 wire running to the location where my SB3, and was planning to use it as the main network input,but I do have wireless... but I don't understand why I'd plug the computer into it as Nick was saying...
If you have cat5 and wireless, you're all set. I'm not sure why you'd connect your PC directly to the SB3, either. The only reason to run your PC directly to the SB3 is if you don't have a network set up. I far prefer using Foobar for my office listening, anyway, so no need for an SB3 in there. In the living room, I'm not willing to put up with a media PC, so the SB3's a great, compact option.