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Seriously . . . when I was leaving Adobe 6 years ago, we were just looking at implementing our first Terabyte SAN array. Now I’m sure Jerry can give us the actual numbers as to what they’re using now . . . but that was for a multi-national corporation employing thousands of people. Fast forward to today.

At home I have a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device which is a 500 Gb RAID5 (Mike and Brandon, you don’t need to know what that means) array. On my laptop I have a 150 Gb hard drive and my home PC I think has a 250 Gb hard drive. So I myself, have nearly 1 Terabyte in storage. And that’s a mere 6 years later.

Today I was looking at upgrading the hard drive on my laptop because I only have 20 Gb (ONLY!) of storage left. If I were to put my music collection on my laptop, that would be gone. So I’m looking at getting a 320 Gb 7200 RPM SATA drive for my laptop. OR a 500 Gb 5400 RPM SATA drive . . . dunno if I really need the extra couple of milliseconds of access time or not . . .

Now I know that my storage doesn’t even come close to what some of you have (Steve, Scott?). But I’d like to insulate myself for the immediate future (3 – 5 years) and potentially upgrade the drives in my home NAS. Maybe I should just buy four 500 Gb Drives for 1.5 Terabytes of storage and call it good? (Yes, I know that 4 X 500 = 2,000 but a RAID5 Array uses one of the disks for parity information so should one drive go down, the array can re-build the data when a new drive is inserted . . . OK, Brandon and Mike, now you know what RAID5 is)

Here’s what I’d like to do (time and money allowing):

1. Upgrade drive in laptop to 320 – 500 Gb (Cost: Approx. $100.00)
2. Upgrade drives in NAS to 500 Gb Each (Cost: $75.00 X 4 = $300.00)
3. Build a Windows Home Server and configure auto backups of the laptop(s) and home machines (Cost????)

It’s amazing to me how many technologies have now come to the consumer mass-market that were just being implemented in corporations a few years ago. I have a VoIP phone at home (Comcast). I have a NAS. I have a wireless network with multiple access points (only because I had an extra AP and wanted to be cheeky). What is next? Any pointers on any of the above would be greatly appreciated. Steve? Comments on WHS would be really helpful.