I have a Acer Revo, similar to the one posted above, running XBMC (http://xbmc.org/).
I stream all my media from a Synology DS211J (http://www.ebuyer.com/247319-synology-ds211j-2-bay-nas-enclosure-ds211j)
This has 2 hard-drives running in RAID1, so all data is backed up.
It is an expensive solution but it plays everything I throw at it and I have very little risk of losing anything.