Patent ID: 8069255

Claim:
An apparatus comprising: a media management server module on a computer-readable storage medium, the media management server module to: provide residential gateway functions that include home networking; receive device characteristics of a first device of a plurality of devices in a user premises, the device characteristics including a size of a memory associated with the first device, an allocation status of the memory, a first indicator to indicate whether the memory is removable, and a second indicator to indicate whether the first device is portable; maintain device profile data for each of the plurality of devices, the device profile data including an indication of available memory for each of the plurality of devices; manage storage of media assets across aggregate available memory of the plurality of devices based on the device profile data of each of the plurality of devices; receive a request from a requesting device to store a media file; determine a smallest memory block of the available memory for each of the plurality of devices; when the smallest memory block is greater than or equal to a size of the media file, store the media file at the smallest memory block; when the smallest memory block is less than the size of the media file, identify blocks of the available memory, break the media file into pieces, and store the pieces in the identified blocks via a linked list structure; generate a first warning when the media file is to be stored on a removable device based on a first data element in the device profile data that indicates whether the requesting device is removable; and generate a second warning when the media file is to be stored on a device having removable storage based on a second data element in the device profile data that indicates whether the requesting device includes the removable storage.