New 1 Terrabyte USB drive : Seeking recommendations

[MikeTbob]

Hi everyone, I recently was gifted a brand new 1 Terrabyte USB external storage drive. Here is a link to the 4TB model.
Desktop hard drive | External Desktop hard drives | FreeAgent | GoFlex Desk | Seagate

I have a lot of Movies, Music and misc data but I have plenty of Internal space for this. Before the new drive, I had one 320 GB and one 160 GB drives. I have unused/unpartitioned free space on both Internal drives. I have more than plenty of blank CD/DVD's to fool around with if I feel the need to start distro hopping again. In short, I have no idea what to do with this monster HDD that I have.
I thought about creating a low spec, Linux powered "Media entertainment center" for the Living room and use the GoFlex for storage of MP3's but that machine does not support booting from USB.
Maybe I should move one of my internal drives to the low spec machine and use the GoFlex drive as my main HDD?

We have 3 machines that are in use everyday, I suppose now would be a good time to start doing system backups on a regular basis.

So, any other recommendations? What would you do with a "Spare 1 TB USB drive"?

[elija]

Nice gift! I use mine (1.5TB) to take hourly snapshots of my data using back-in-time. They have saved my ass a couple of times

[Jonathan183]

I think you will find USB rather slow for transfer of data and if you pull the drive out of it's case any warranty will be invalid
I'd probably use the drive for backups ... but you could combine that with the media center and network the drive, either pull the drive out of the case and use it in the media center direct or leave it in the case and hook it up via USB (assume you have the right interface for the drive available - think it could be SATA).

[Roxoff]

If it's USB2, then it's more than quick enough for use in a media centre - but I'm with the others, it's just right to be used as backup storage. Can you do remote backups of the other machines across a network?

[MikeTbob]

If it's USB2, then it's more than quick enough for use in a media centre - but I'm with the others, it's just right to be used as backup storage. Can you do remote backups of the other machines across a network?

It's actually USB 3.0 but I only have USB 1.1 and 2.0 ports.
I'm sure I could set up remote backup, I might need another Wireless card but that's no biggie. I think that's a pretty good idea. Thanks.

[TaZMAniac]

I set up a low end media center using the DLNA feature of my Samsung Blu-Ray player. Made sure the player can encode DTS sound to stereo as I don't have surround sound speakers. Yet!

Hooked up a cat-5 cable from my router to the Blu-Ray player.
Then installed Serviio which streams movies, music and pictures to the tv through the Blu-Ray player.
Have movies on my Raid 1 drives and music and pictures on the other.
Streams 720p and 1080p flawlessly.

Cost of Blu-Ray player was under $100 on sale.
I can also connect a USB hard drive to the player and if it contains movies, music or pictures it will recognize them and categorize them in a menu that allows you to select what you want to watch or hear.
USB 2 will work fine for these applications.

4 Tb hard drive?!!!!
I'd love something like that!
Nice gift.

[MikeTbob]

Sweet idea. I guess I might start looking at some Blue-Ray players. I only have a 1 TB, the link above is to a 4 TB which is all I could find at the time.

[TaZMAniac]

I only have a 1 TB, the link above is to a 4 TB which is all I could find at the time.

With the prices of hard drives since the flooding in Asia, a 1 Tb hard drive is still a good present.

If you need any help or have questions about Blu-Ray features just pm me.