Looking For Technical Advice

So, I'm in need of some technical advice.
I got an Apple TV for Christmas (thanks Mom and Dad) and I love it. Just so you all know, an apple TV is like an iPod for your TV. It can play music, podcasts,TV shows and movies on your TV. When its connected to the internet, you can buy and rent movies through iTunes. If it is networked with a computer with iTunes running it can play anything in the iTunes library. Right now mine sits connected to a 19" TV in my kitchen and uses WiFi to connect to my network. I like it so much that I'm thinking about getting an older used 40 Gb model to use just to stream content from my PC to my TV in the living room. If that works out well, I met get a third for the bedroom. I'm also thinking about breaking a used one open and plopping in a terabyte drive.


I have a huge DVD collection. Were talking around 500 titles, and 10 or 12 Television series (4-10 discs per season). Ideally I would like to have them all be watchable through my apple TV, but for now I'm mostly concerned with getting the TV shows on. I'm using anyDVD and handbrake to transcode the DVDs to a format that itunes can understand. I add them to iTunes, and add metadata and artwork (if anyone has good ideas for an automated way to this I would love to hear it - I do it by hand with copy/paste and IMDb).As long as my PC is on, with iTunes running anything in my library is watchable on apple TV.

And this is where I need some advice. I've got 2 issues.

The first is storage. I have a 750Gb internal hard drive, plus a 1Tb external drive for local backup. Both are almost full. I've barely made a dent in copying my DVD collection, and I've run out of room. I need a good way to store all this stuff.

I have another internal bay that I could install another big hard drive, like a 1.5Tb or 2Tb drive in and just keep things the way they are; massive storage, and iTunes always running. Or, I could just plug in another external drive. I have another eSATA port free. I don't like having a bunch of external drives hanging around, but if that's the best thing, then its the best thing.

I've thought about a NAS (Networked Attached Storage). I think I'll want 3-4Tb of storage to copy everything and leave room to grow, but I'm not sure if a NAS and iTunes will play well with each other.
I like the looks of the Linksys NAS200, mostly because I can paint it up to match my linksys router and have a matching set.












Also what about redundancey? I like the idea of setting up a RAID 5 System. Would a Drobo be a good choice?

The Second Problem is leaving the copmuter on all the time. Well, thats not exactly the problem, my computer is on just about all the time, but I dual boot my machine and run ubuntu sometimes. I use Ubuntu for things like bit torrent where I'm trying to innoculate myself from viruses. Once I'm running Ubuntu I generally only reboot into windows after a few days to sync my iphone. Otherwise there are very few things I can't do in ubuntu. Things like sync my iPhone, or let my Apple TV access my full library.

So my second question is about NAS boxes. Are there products or software that can host my iTunes library for Apple TV? I know I can map a NAS to my computer, but that won't work if the computer isn't running windows/iTunes.

I'm still doing a bunch of research into this, but I think I would like some opinions on what I should do. I know the apple TV market is pretty limited, but I'm still hoping someone may point me in the right direction. If you've got some ideas, or some tech savvy friends pass this along and let me know what they think.


Thanks!