Your situation sounds very
Your situation sounds very similar to my own, so I won’t repeat everything. But, I do have over 13TB in my server, so picture your own setup, just much larger. 🙂
I have no plans of moving to WHS 2011 because I simply don’t see any benefit to doing so. I will most likely be moving to a regular Windows 7 installation for the server, using Macrium Reflect for PC backups and FlexRAID for some data protection of my recordings and Blu-ray rips. I have not used Macrium or the latest version of FlexRAID, so I can’t say for certain that they’ll be exactly what I need. But, I have used previous versions of FlexRAID (several years ago) and liked what I saw.
If you don’t want to get that complex, I’d just add more storage (NAS, bigger case, etc) and “archive” shows that sit for a while. You could set up some batch jobs to help automate this or, if you use SageTV, Sage Job Queue (SJQ) could do most of this, but it does have a bit of a learning curve.
This is a situation where there are numerous opportunities and it’s a matter of figuring out which one fits your needs, your setup, and your budget. Note that, other than the hardware I mentioned (and SageTV, of course), all programs I listed are free. SJQ v3 is free, but SJQ v4 is not ($4.99 CAN).