Central, wireless, storage of all music, photos, videos, movies?

Hi all,

Please excuse if this is covered elsewhere... i looked and could not find a direct answer. A friend pointed me towards the DS214 play and after some research i am not sure i need to leave the apple family or pay for the Synology name. As a somewhat tech saavy father of 2.5 kids (due May), i wanted to ask other apple parents if they have similar needs with their home enjoyment and see what solutions are out there.

My situation. i have a 1TB imac and a macbook pro. We store all music and tv shows/movies puchased on the imac so apple tv can access them. we have our current iphoto library on the imac where we interact with iphones and ipads, and also apple tv for pics/home videos.

my problem is that i have tens of thousands of pics and a thousand home movies stored on external drives because i ran out of room on the imac hard drive and because iphoto wasn't performing well with so many files in one library. we use iphoto manager (3rd party) to jump between libraries which is fine but not ideal. I hate having different external drives connected for fear they may die one day or a cord gets pulled out or a child breaks one. furthermore, i am using externals to back up my externals, etc etc. it's a physical hardware mess. i want to take my digital family life to the next level using a home HUB of sorts.

Here are a few examples of what we want, thanks in advance for any help!

1. We have an imac and a macbook pro laptop. Is there any way to store the main photo library centrally so that we can edit and organize pictures and videos from both machines and have the changes/updates seamless appear on the other? (thought was to store the iphoto library file on a hub or similar, not on the imac hard drive)

2. We have two apple tvs and would like both to be able to access all movies, music, photos, videos from a central storage. right now they speak to the itunes library on the imac which is fine. but neither can access our archive iphoto libraries stored on external hard drives connected to the imac.

3. Aside from buying a much bigger and more expensive computer, and putting everything back on the main hard drive... my thought was if all these photos (and / or libraries) were stored in a central HUB location i could access them from both a laptop and imac and save myself the space on the computer hard drives and access them interchangeably without worrying about an external drives being unplugged, dropped, etc.

But this goes back to #1 and #2 above, can all these files, found in either one huge iphoto library and itunes library, or several libraries, be stored in a central wireless HUB location and be accessed and shared and enjoyed as if they were sitting on the main computer hardrive?

Lastly, i would like the ability to back everything up... meaning a HUB that had two drives or a partition so it could back itself up. basically swapping out 3 USB connected hard drives used as storage and backup for some sort of wireless HUB, that can be used by a few computers, apple tv and back itself up?

thank you very much in advance. I hope all this makes sense....

best,
JW