[jyl]

Thanks for the DIY suggestion - seems like I might end up doing that.

Yeah, the ready-made networked storage solutions for consumers are too expensive and too small. 250GB? Hardly.

Figure a full-length movie ripped from a DVD is 4GB, 40 minutes of a mini-DV videotape is 5GB, programs transferred from TiVo are multiple GB also.

If I put all my music, DVDs, video, etc on disk, I can see wanting 1TB+ within the next year. Down the road, I could see wanting several TB. Then 2X that, for the backup.

Raw hard drive capacity is cheap. Even now, if you look for deals and rebates, you can get $0.40/GB or $400/TB. When drives go to perpendicular recording in the next year, capacity will be even cheaper. So it really burns me to pay $3-4/GB for external networked storage.