Digital Home Thoughts: Sony HES-V1000 Home Entertainment Server

"It’s time to take that old drawer full of VHS tapes out back and give it the proper burial it deserves. Analog is dead. But while the VCR’s successor, the DVR, offers a quick way to record media, one thing it doesn’t offer is much in the way of long term, archival storage. Great for taping last night’s episode of Lost, not so great for keeping baby’s first steps. And with the explosion of high-def media, anything that’s going to store it for a while is going to need a lot of storage. Fortunately, Sony’s got it covered with its latest entertainment system. The Sony HES-V1000 Home Entertainment Server is a library in a box. With a 500GB hard drive, plus room for over 200 Blu-ray discs in its built-in changer, the unit’s capacity borders on absurdity. The hard drive alone can handle 137 hours of video, 40,000 songs or 20,000 digital photos. A full load of 25GB single-layer Blu-ray discs would represent an additional 5TB in digital storage – 10TB if they were dual layer."



200 Blu-ray disks? 8O That is a nice setup, but I am not so sure that this is how I would want 5TB (or 10TB with the dual layer disks). I would personally much rather have a hard drive based system. Yes, it would probably consume more electricity and yes it would probably be less reliable given that hard drives fail and disks survive (unless scratched); but hard drives are faster, and from a technology point of view, they will likely last longer than a blu-ray. The good news, at least for all Sony fans, is that it is compatible with all Sony technologies like the PS3, memory sticks, etc. Plus, it can output media in all you favorite formats. My favorite is the fact that it can play four simultaneous audio streams which is pretty cool.