Buffalo Technology has announced (in Japan) a 1000GB networked hard drive, the TeraStation, that appears to be designed and priced for the consumer market.
The TeraStation contains 4 250GB hard drives and can operate in 4 modes: with 4 seperate logical partitions of 250GB storage, with 1 partition of 1000GB, with a Raid-1 array offering 2 250gb partitions (each mirrored to a seperate drive in case of failure), or a Raid-5 array of 750GB.
Personally I prefer the Raid-5 array as it gives 750GB of storage along with no data loss if one of the 4 drives fail.
Some people will say who will ever need 1000GB of storage, but the same was said when 1GB was first available, or when 20MB hard drives came along.... with a high resultion camera I can easily take 1GB of photos in a day, or if you want to record TV and stream to other rooms in your house you need a lot of storage space.
The TeraStation also offers fast connectivity with USB2.0 and (more importantly) Gibabit Ethernet. The question is, can I justify buying one of these to be the central filestore in my hew home network.
The TeraStation will be available in Japan in December 2004 for 106,300 Yen (about $1,000).
(via Gizmodo)
I setup a 240GB RAID5 array a couple of years ago. I thought that I would never fill that up. But now I'm ready to upgrade to a 750GB array, as I have filled up my current array many times over. Video and CDROM images take up a lot of space. And that new 8MP camera isn't exactly a space saver either.