It just seems that "never enough" applies to hard drives. I clearly remember back around 1990 when 20MB (yes Megabyte, not Gigabyte) drives were the most common at that time, I spent a lot of month getting an 80MB drive in hopes that I would never outgrow it's capacity. Yeah right.

My iMac has an internal 250GB, I've got (2) 320GB External FireWire 400 drives connected to it. My Media Center Edition 2005 (Windows) computer which currently powers my AV system has (1) 160GB drive and (2) 500GB drives. I won't count either my wife's or my work notebooks into the mix. That's a grand total of just over 2TB of raw drive storage (less actual space after formatting, that and the fact that hard drive manufacturers use 1000 base calculations when they should be using 1024 - a binary versus decimal argument but at the end of the day a drive rating in GB from the manufacturer is overly optimistic because it's using 1000 instead of 1024 in determining the capacity.)

I've been pondering a NAS unit for some time and gave it a lot of thought today. If I go the NAS route the Infrant (NetGear) ReadyNAS NV+ looks like the top choice. The box without drives is about $650. The option that I may opt for instead is to build an inexpensive Windows XP box (or migrate my MCE box when I move to a new AV media serving platform) and run a RAID 5 array in a PC based NAS box. One big advantage in my opinion is that client computers don't have to load any drivers to access the NAS like you have to with NAS specific boxes like the ReadyNAS.

There are plusses and minuses with any solution. Some will argue that a large external drive is a great solution, but I shutter to think if the drive failed. I'm not comfortable with a LAN network storage solution that isn't a RAID solution.

The Drobo is a cool solution, and it can plug into an Airport Extreme. However the ReadyNAS is significantly faster than the Drobo, and only $100 more money, and it has far better connectivity options. It depends on how you intend to use it.

I'm going to end up staying with my current setup for now, but when the time comes I guess I am leaning towards a NAS RAID box built on a PC as it's the most versatile solution and it's still cheaper than a ReadyNAS, and I already have most of the pc parts to get it up and running already. Then again, there is something to be said about appliances, and a ReadyNAS NV+ just sits there and does it's job without the hassles of being a full blown computer.

Windows Home Server is coming out later this year, but I don't see much advantage to it over a ReadyNAS or a generic PC with RAID.

And while talking about data storage, please please please backup your data. I use SuperDuper! and with a paid copy of it, you can automatically do nightly backups. I have a "Clone" external drive of my Machintosh HD, it updates nightly. And it has saved my ass a couple of times already. You can't be too careful when it comes to backing up your system. An offsite copy of your backup is a must also, I do this on DVD's today, but will probably just buy another external drive for the task.

One question I have about Leopard and Time Machine is whether Time Machine can backup to a NAS and not just an external hard drive.