Home Network Infrastructure

So the other day I started thinking about how much hard drive space I would need in the house for the forseeable next few years. Think about all the video, and pictures and music files that we accumulate over the years, until recently this was in the form of a CD collection/dvd collection, and some cassette (yes I had quite the cassette collection).

Lately the profileration of digital media has brought a huge onslaught of external hard drive equipment over the last 5-10 years, and prices have gone down accordingly. Today you can get a terrabyte drive for just under a $100 bucks, but of course you would need at leat two for redundancy purchases. I mean you can't risk losing pictures forever, especially since we rarely ever print them, we instead stockpile the data slowing down our computers and wonder why our available local hard drive space is in the red.

Why now I do think about these issues you may ask, well I have recently become the father of two, no not twins, but damn near close, my daughter Isabella is 1 year and 5 months old, and our newest addition my son Mishka is only 2 and 1/2 months old. We have a 320 gig hard drive with no back up other than our locals, my wifes and my laptops, and I am looking at increasing our storage and can't decide which way to go, I think at the end of the day I am going to get 2 1TB harddrives, I expect that to last for atleast a few years, but I have to wonder that as our cameras approach 20 pixels and our video becomes only HD, how much storage will my kids need when they become teenagers? Is cloud computing going to solve all our problems, can it even become that inexpensive, will we all at one point or another have server rooms in our homes comparable in size to most small to mid sized companies today? Where can we possibly keep all the data? I don't trust third parties storing irreplacable items, at one point I thought about burning back up dvd's just in case, but where would you store them?

I know this is a lot of questions with no answers, but I should hope that within 5-10 years there will be 10TB SSD's (solid state drives) the size of a credit card for all our data needs, they will surely be available at Wal Mart at one of the end caps, for.......I don't know $39.99 sounds fair.

What kind of network infrastructure do you have at your home, or think you will need to have in the next few years?

Inquiring minds want to know.....