The Quest For Awesome - Home Server Saga-Part 1

Once upon a time, 
A couple college kids were sitting around downloading the internet over 56k modems and were thinking that the 4GB hard drive that they just scored for a couple hundred bucks was going to last them a long time. Then they got a cable modem, discovered MP3s and networked their machines with BNC cables, at a staggering 2MB a sec! (Long before YouTube was launched in Feb 2005, btw) Their world, would never be the same..
That 4GB drive did last a long time; a year or so. It was replaced/supplemented with an 8GB drive. And then a 12GB Drive... See where this is going?
Now, there are individual files that are over 6GB in my collection of data. That's a single file that I wouldn't be able to store on that paltry 4GB drive. Hell, Windows won't even install on less than 10GB these days.
I'm not here to talk about the old days but only to put into perspective the rate that we are acquiring digital assets. It's staggering. In 1995 I had a single (hardly utilized) 30MB drive that I only upgraded because of a lightning strike. I was able to upgrade to a 130MB and thought I was hot stuff. It was true for the time too, but who could really predict the gravity of the digital revolution?
So, on to the topic, "Where the hell am I going to put all this stuff?"

  • A Single Drive?
  • External Drives?
  • DVD Backups?
  • Multiple drives?
  • RAID?
  • Offsite? 
  • Where?
  • The Cloud?
  • How much will this cost???

These are the questions that we will address as we go forward. So, Go forward with me and I will share the pain and the victories I have had. We will start with the "Plan".