My hopes have been revived by CharlesWayneCT's suggestion about a wireless data station (or network USB hub), which would allow me to buy a cheaper external USB hard drive, and connect it to the network through one of these devices.
I brought my 1-terabyte drive online Sunday, formatted as a raid-1 so it’s only 470 gig in the end.
I plan on hooking a couple of 500-gig USB drives to it tonight or tomorrow, so I’ll let you know if that works for me.
My 1tb drive apparently has internal backup capability, meaning I can schedule automated backup from the drive to a USB-connected drive, without a computer. That will give me automated backup of 500 gb of data, in addition to the increased real-time ability of the Raid-1 configuration.
I also took the opportunity to bring a new gigabit plus wireless-N router online, to augment my Verizon fios wireless router. This was to get my 2 gigabit ethernet network drives faster access to the main computer, and also I ran a gigabit ethernet line to my xbox-360, which I still don’t know if it’s gigabit or 100megabit.
It was auto-setup, which surprised me because I thought I’d have trouble with two wireless routers, but now I have two different wireless connections in my house, with two different networks, one supporting my wireless-N and the other for my older wireless-G stuff.