Heya,
When I mentioned the minimum it takes to be a HTPC, I was referring to the appropriate video/audio hardware needed to output to your display and speakers. In my case, I use the series 8 Geforce for the PureHD hardware decoding of DVD in my software player Cyberlink PowerDVD 8 (supports HD content); and audio wise, I use the dolby digital encoding/decoding hardware power of an Auzentech 7.1 Cinema Explosion sound card to output dolby digital audio to my reciever for my 5.1 home theater setup, and it's dolby digital live encoding feature to encode non-5.1 content into 5.1 (like stereo music, old videos, etc; encodes them to 5.1 dolby digital and outputs them that way; great feature to enrichen 2 channel music/audio).
Uptime in a HTPC essentially concerns a system that has all the drives internal. In that sort of case, a great way to go is RAID5 with 3 hard drives (minimum req). How it works, is that it writes parity to the drives and you get combined storage of two of the drives. RAID5's parity gives you drive failure tolerance without destroying the RAID array and thus losing data. You can watch movies, whatever, and if one of the drives fails, it will let you know, but will not turn off or lose data, it rebuilds the data on the drive that failed via the parity that was written to the other drives (this is what RAID5 does). Then you just replace the damaged/failed drive with a new one, and the RAID5 array rebuilds and writes the parity data to the new drive and you're back to normal--without even shutting off the system. That's uptime. The added benefit is that you see the RAID5 array as a single drive on the computer (instead of multiple drives). So if you bought 3x 1tb drives in a RAID5 configuration, it would have 2tb storage as a single drive that your OS would see, and it would allow for one drive to fail (any one drive in that array) and still work and not lose data. This is not for backing up (though some use it) since two drive fails means you lose the data, but it is a good way to maintain uptime, ie, allow for a fail to happen and not have to redo it all, since you can replace the drive and the data gets rebuilt from parity on the other drives. It's a handy way to maintain a massive storage capacity while allowing for a single hard drive failure to occur and not immediately lose data because of it.
In your situation, you mentioned you'd like to backup to HDD and just get rid of your original discs; that's ok. I know the feeling. If you store the data on a single HDD, that drive hast he potential to fail and you lose that data permanently--the same way an internal single drive can fail, an external does the same thing. In your case, a RAID5 (3 minimum drives, allows one to fail before losing data) or RAID6 (4 minimum drives, allows 2 to fail before losing data) would be more appropriate for long term use/storage of media files. It's more elaborate, more expensive, and takes up more physical space than a single external drive of course, but if you want to try to protect a bit against physical drive fails and the loss of data without going into more long term backup approaches (optimal writes, tape, etc), it's a way to keep your data ticking with some fault tolerance. RAID is all about redundancy and uptime, ie, lets you combine storage capacity from several inexpensive drives and spread data around them so that one can fail and not lose data due to bits of data striped across them all (that is what RAID5/6 do; RAID0 is zero tolerance, just speed; RAID1 is mirror, it just copies what is on the disc to another disc in a 1:1 ratio).
I mount digitized DVDs via DaemonTools. I don't backup DVDs are vob/folders. I back them up as Image Files (.ISO). Then I use software like DaemonTools to emulate a DVD drive and mount digital images to that emulated DVD drive (the result is, no DVD drive is there, no disc is in it, but the computer thinks it has a DVD drive with a disc in it--all from a digital source, but the computer sees it as hardware). Your software is also automatically mounting. I simply use separate software for separate jobs. DVDFab5 for the decode/rip/copy, DaemonTools for my emulation & mounting of optical media hardware & disc images, and PowerDVD 8 for my DVD playback.
Creative Labs is not the only maker of soundcards and they're not top quality either. They have some nice cards, but they have very bloated software with their drivers and frankly, there are many other audio solutions out there to explore. Asus & M-audio for example simply have better sounding output to my ears than a Creative card. Ultimately, I went with the Auzentech 7.1 Cinema Explosion because for the price, it had the quality I wanted, the output capabilities, the hardware decoding and encoding of dolby digital and sony DTS content, and it has dolby digital live which allows me to real time hardware encode any audio to 5.1 dolby digital for output to my receiver; makes nice for stereo/mono music and older video/audio content output). What matters is what you prefer, sound wise, and what covers your needs. There are many cards and solutions out there; CreativeLabs is not the top dog nor the best choice (years ago, they were unmatched, but now, they're not--they lost a lot of their place when Vista rolled out and they failed to catch up to Vista, other audio makers came in and replaced them fast with good support).
Very best,
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