Over the holiday break, I scored a 1 Tb Fantom External Drive for the post-rebate price of $89! After I attached it—replacing a 160 Gb external drive, thus illustrating the truism that more capacity begets more need—I began thinking about the role of storage in the home.

It's long past obvious that homes today commonly contain a lot of computing horsepower accompanied by significant storage requirements, as well as significant storage management issues. With the rise of digital devices like cameras and PMPs, lots of personally important data is strewn about different machines. In fact, it wouldn't be far off the mark to say that many homes now resemble mini-data centers, and pose the same type of problems that corporate data centers face, albeit at smaller overall volumes. That's balanced, on the other hand, by the fact that much of the data in home data centers is far more emotionally important to its owners. While secure practices regarding your company's data may be important to you, professionally speaking, it is nowhere near as personally important as the footage of your child taking his or her first steps.

This presents you with a dilemma regarding your storage practices. Of course, each machine comes with its own disk—and probably a pretty high capacity one at that. Today's machines typically ship with 300 to 500 GB of disk storage. Every machine in the house having a bunch of storage isn't ideal, however (we have around six or seven spread through different rooms; I'm never quite sure, as it seems machines come and go). And in any case, I am leery of putting important data on the default disk layout of a Windows box, since when you get around to (the seemingly inevitable task of) reinstalling and reformatting the machine, your data can be wiped out in an instant.

You can repartition, of course, to place important data on a different partition on the internal disk, thus avoiding this issue, but then you've got data on a drive secreted away in the machine. With the space tolerances of many boxes these days, if something happens to the disk, you'll never be able to get at it. Consequently, I don't like using internal drives because of data robustness issues. In any case, even if you are willing to live with internal drives, you still are faced with the issue of having important data dispersed on different machines, posing problems of keeping track of it and backing it up. Hmmm. This is reminiscent of the issue with direct-attached storage within the data center, so my analogy of the home data center is, perhaps, not as far-fetched as it might seem.