About a year ago I had a basic home network consisting of my computer, my laptop, my roommates computer & laptop, and one media server. Within two weeks I had my computer and server have severe harddrive failures. I took the chance to purchase a bunch of 1 TB black caviar WD sata HDDs. Originally I was going to put them all in individual enclosures, but that's expensive as all hell. It's also expensive to buy a commercial esata array enclosure setup.

In the end I used instructions from a bunch of different websites and built an esata based array consisting of 10 1 TB drives in a raid 1 configuration. I then hooked up the array to a thin client and put it on the network. The problem (as you've probably already thought of) is that the thin client was a severe bottleneck, and I was an idiot to think it could act as a media server. I ended up buying a cheap dual core system, hooked up a geforce 8400 into it, and now use it as a media server.

 

With 10 drives wouldn't it be better to use RAID 5 or even 6? Instead of using half the space for redundant storage you'd need 1 orr 2 - increasing your space by 3 or 4 T.