One of my co-workers, whose new job seems to be stuffing my flash drives full of purloined video (good lord, I just remembered he used to run a porn BBS...I can't even finish that thought...) showed me the 8 or so TB he brings to work every single day--of personal data. Which, hey, full runs of Red Dwarf and Archer coming my way, as well as random documentaries, but...whose leisure time needs that much portable (HEAVY) storage?

I run a Drobo raid for my archives. It's at around 15 TB at the moment if my memory is correct. I am hopeful that by the time I need to add more space to it SATA mechanisms are larger than the current max of 4 TB. I believe I have all five bays in the Drobo populated with 4 TB drives at the moment.

Having 3G on the Kindle is a life-saver when you're out of wifi range and finish your book and need to buy the next one in the series RIGHT NOW.

(Disclaimer, no actual lives have been saved by use of this feature, but several hours of boredom were successfully averted.)

Wen I had my NAS replaced with something less fucked up, I decided to go with RAID 1 instead of 0. I still feel like I'm missing a step in being safe, but at least I'm safer.

However, obviously I have half the storage I'd planned for.

And I don't like its performance.

ND--you have the same one. Do you have a visible latency in OSX, especially when it comes to folders with 100s of items in it? It's frustrating--and it doesn't always have to be large amounts. Sometimes I have to go away and leave Finder or whatever, instead of the watched pot browsing.

Also, I've never worked out how to get to most of the shares without navigating the long way--OS X volume, to shares, and then on, rather than having it display under Shared.

Man...I used to be able to follow this stuff. Ah, well. Price of progress.

My NAS has been making a disturbing sound lately. I can probably just replace the fan, but it gives me an excuse to get a new one. My current one is slow. It was dirt cheap but I kinda got what I paid for.

RAID 1 is pretty safe and simple, RAID 0 is kinda scary but fast. I think the only thing you're missing is offsite storage. There's RAID 10 which is two RAID 1 arrays combined in a RAID 0 array to get the benefits of both. Course if you have four drives you could use RAID 5, but I suspect that would lower performance quite a bit from RAID 10.

I can use RAID 5 with only three drives, right?

It's funny because I just bought the extra one, but it's pretty clear that my storage needs are about to expand pretty exponentially.

I'm now thinking about using the 3TB as a normal standalone, and changing out my NAS entirely.

I can use RAID 5 with only three drives, right?

Yes

I'm going to say something that has probably been said many times before.

itunes has totally screwed me and I have no idea how to redeem this situation.

No matter how many how too guides I read, I cannot seem to fix the fact that itunes 11 swallowed hundreds of songs and now won't let me add the few I have left to my iphone/touch.

I'm so pissed, I could scream.

I have two previous itunes library back ups but I can't get either one of them onto the phone. What the everloving WHAT.

You're not using iTunes Match, are you?