[Still Thinking]

I’m VERY interested in the ReadyNAS PRO, but they just came out, so you can’t get them on Ebay yet except new ones. Then Netgear doesn’t really want to sell them diskless, so it costs almost as much to get a diskless one as a minimal configuration like (2) 500gb disks, so you might as well take it with the disks, take them out and use them for low end desktops, and put your own disks in the shell. But it’s still like $1600-1700 so it’ll really put a dent in the budget.

[smokingfrog]

If you have valuable data on your computer that you can't replace, I guess you just have to bite the bullet and spend the money. The drobo doesn't come with any drives either, but I think you can get one for about $350. You can add drives as you need them or use an old one that is just sitting around to start out with (works with different sized drives). Good for non-techies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIMZkSVk03E