This made me think...
Man, I'd really be in the market for a "hard-drive Nimbie". I'm picturing a device much like the
Thermaltake BlacX drive dock line, where you could use a piece of software to have essentially "infinite storage archival space" (assuming you feed it enough drives). I'm thinking something that works like this:
1. The device is like a BlacX dock, where you have one or more SATA ports on the top, where you can plug in 2.5-3.5" SATA drives.
2. I use their software to create a queue of files that you want to archive off to external on-the-shelf storage (hopefully via drag and drop and a Windows Explorer/Finder shell extension where you right-click and choose "Nimbify" or something).
3. When I'm done building my queue, I hit a "Go" button to start the queue.
4. It calculates the total amount of storage that the operation will require, and suggests the proper number and configuration of disks for you to have available. It would also be nice if it could also use disks of a variety of sizes. So, if you need 6400GB to complete the queue, you could either use 7 1TB drives, or assemble a collection variously-sized blank drives that add up to at least 6400GB, and tell it what you have.
5. It also calculates the optimal storage configuration of the files, so that drives don't have a bunch of wasted space at the "end".
6. Then, it prompts you to insert the first disk(s), and it starts moving, verifying, and cataloging the queue.
7. It saves, to each drive in the archive, some sort of database you can use (maybe just an excel spreadsheet, or maybe a sql database or something) to find these files later when you need them, and restore them back to their original configuration "online".
That would be a sweet piece of kit. I'd buy one in an instant.
