The topic of this article, summed up in one word, is „RAID“. You need RAID. Over the years, the general population has been demanding higher storage capabilities at lower prices. And hard drive manufacturers have been meeting those demands, sacrificing quality in the process. Heck, the warranty on your new hard drive will expire by the time you drive home from Best Buy; how long do you think the drive itself will actually last?
Note that this article will probably become obsolete relatively soon. Amusingly, while searching for reference material, I found Build a 1.5 Terabyte SAN for less than $35,000. This article describes how to build a 1.2TB SAN for about $1,600.
Build a Fault-Tollerant Terabyte Storage Server for Under $1.98
[via Richard Schwartz]