I think the course of action we're going to take is to eventually have two of those $100 4-drive enclosures plugged into his tower via an ESATA expansion card. He wants to manually back everything up as he goes (he says for ease of mind, I can understand not trusting automation), and if for some reason the PSU blows up or overloads and fries all of the drives in one enclosure there's a second one in a physically different location.
I do love my old computer so perhaps in 6 months or a year when I upgrade my current machine I'll convert it into a server based on all the help provided so far.
As for where his current media is residing... it's on two external drives. Whether or not they will be used as tertiary back up or not (for those super precious files) I'm not sure... but it's always nice to have something smaller you can lug around so I doubt he'd sell them.
I do love my old computer so perhaps in 6 months or a year when I upgrade my current machine I'll convert it into a server based on all the help provided so far.
As for where his current media is residing... it's on two external drives. Whether or not they will be used as tertiary back up or not (for those super precious files) I'm not sure... but it's always nice to have something smaller you can lug around so I doubt he'd sell them.