This weekend was Fry's usual Memorial Day sale. Friday's ad didn't have anything special and today's ad had some intriguing stuff, but nothing that made me drive over immediately. However, when my brother's computer started acting up, I needed to get him a new case so I headed over.

Once there, I just couldn't pass up 400gig drives for $99. I didn't think they'd still have them in stock, but there they were...just calling my name. I ended up buying two since my array at home is getting full (838gigs). I then proceeded to buy a Netgear SC101. This cool little machine allows you to put in two hard drives and then you just plug it into your network and you have access immediately. You can either have them as two separate drives, one large drive, or mirrored drives. I chose two separate drives because if one drive fails when you have them set up as one larger drive, you lose all the data. And I don't need mirroring for the data I'm going to put on it.

Total Cost: $330. Two drives at $100 each and the Netgear at $130. $330 for 742 gigs of networked storage out of the box with the easiest setup. The closest thing I could think of to this is Buffalo's TeraStation. Their 1000gig TeraStation goes for $680 at the cheapest online store. So you get 2x500 drives instead of 2x400 for double the price. If they still had these deals tomorrow, I'd be tempted to go back and do it again. Total cost of it all: $0.41 per gig. An absolutely amazing deal.

Now, I know some people might say I have too much storage, but I don't think there's such a thing...

(Drive Name - Drive Type - Drive Size - Free Space)

Total space after formatting: 1,649 gigs (1.65 terrabytes).

URL: Storage Central Shared Storage Technology