As nfaguys points out, even relatively large music libraries stored in a lossless format can probably live pretty comfortably on a terabyte drive array. A terabyte of disc space is not all that expensive, but for the application we're considering the need for backup and redundancy is significant (who wants to re-rip an entire music library, much less a video library). That means that we need to look toward something like RAID5, which means that a terabyte of disc space won't yield a terabyte of capacity. (Depending on how many drives, you'll likely see a capacity closer to 750GB per terabyte, give or take 100GB.) That may not be a problem for music, but DVD's will often be a different matter. The size of a person's DVD library varies pretty wildly, but if we take a good-sized library of 175 to 200 titles and make a few assumptions we can get an idea of how much disc space we need. Assume the bonus discs and extra features will get left off the server and that a fair number of those titles are TV box sets with half a dozen discs each. That means you could be looking at 275 or 300 discs of movie and TV content (more if you feel the need to put extras on the server). Assume that a good number of the discs are double-layer, so that the average data requirement per disc is perhaps 6GB. We now need 1700 to 1800 gigabytes of useable disc space in our array just for the video library. If we also have a similar-size CD library encoded in FLAC (assuming perhaps 200 discs at about 50% compression, which would equate to perhaps 275MB per disc), that's an additional 55 GB - storing as raw WAV files would be a more "audiophile" route that would double the space requirements per disc. Based on this theoretical case, we end up needing the better part of 2 TB just to archive the data already on hand - with no consideration given to future growth or for space to store live TV (SD or HD) for time-shifting. Building a good, robust RAID5 array with a capacity of at least 2TB to 3TB would be key to setting up the sort of media server I'd be interested in. That's going to lead to a pretty substantial first cost - nowhere near what a Kaleidescape server would set you back, but still more than many pocketbooks would allow (including mine). I think the time will come, but for most of us I still don't think it's here yet.