Help me with what to purchase.

StephenB wrote:

Are you are thinking that you'd pull a NAS hard drive, replace it, and store the old one off site? That is not a good way to do it. Replacing a drive requires rebuilding the array, which is stressful on the remaining drives and carries some risk. Also, although the drives can be removed easily, the connectors, etc. are not intended for a lot of swapping. The better approach is to use USB drives, or back up to another NAS.

No. I intend to transfer the data to external drives for safe-keeping.. I've no intention of swapping drives out willy-nilly. Particularly not since I'm investing in Red's which are Ideally suited for NAS usage and little else.

StephenB wrote:

Plex seems to work out well as a ReadyNAS DLNA server. It's built into the RNxxx models, but can be installed on the x86 products as well. It probably could be installed on one of your existing systems if you wanted to see how well it works. There are two main issues - one is whether you need on the fly video transcoding. If so, you need a good CPU in the server. The RN516 has the fastest CPU, the Pro line is faster than the ultra.

AFAIK my Blu-Ray player transcodes video for me, as it stands. But I'm no expert, hence all these silly questions.

StephenB wrote:
The second is how you access your media when you on the road. Is that something you are doing successfully now? If so, how?

No, that is something of a wish-list item for me. I would like to be able to use the data connection on my phone to pull media from my server at will. I was given the impression that this could be accomplished with the ReadyNAS line of products?