[jyl]

Is there such a thing as a inexpensive disk storage system that holds 3+ terabytes?

My goal is to eventually have all our photos, music, video, etc stored on a central pool of storage, that is networked to the home computers. The central storage must be affordable, easily expandable, and allow automated (daily, no-think, no touch) backup to remote storage. I'll locate the remote storage someplace that can be networked but will still survive a house fire, like a fireproof outbuilding. Ideally I'd like everything to run on Mac OS, but I guess I could deal with a mixed Win/Mac environment.

The thing is, the storage system does not need to be super robust - if it fails, I'd simply go to the backup, and if that takes hours or a day, that is okay. It also does not need to be high-performance - I'd be serving up one movie or a couple of music streams, at most.

Right now our data is still stored on the hard drives of the Mac that created it, and backups are to external hard drives. This means we're capacity limited (my iMac G5's 160GB hard drive is rapidly filling up, each uploaded videotape is 5-7GB) and if the house burns down, everything is lost (since the external drive sits next to the Mac).

I'm just starting to research this, and my first question is whether the storage system is going to be affordable. I checked the Apple Xserve RAID and it seems way overbuilt for me. I don't need redundant power supplies, hot-swappable disks, SCSI disks, and so on. Other systems I've looked at also seem like more than I need. I think I just need a bunch of standard SATA disks, a RAID controller, and networking, in an enclosure with a power supply. Since you can get 1 TB of SATA disks for about $300-500, I am thinking $1,000 for the system.

Is this possible? Practical? Tips, anyone?