The external RAID box came in today. It’s formatting now. This would easily fit in a small shoebox and it’s very quiet. Formatting will take a while delaying any conclusions on performance or usability. With two GP WD 750 gig drives on idle it pulled ~18 Watts, which doesn’t seem bad for an always-on appliance.
One nice surprise was to see that it has iTunes integration. All of the music can be put on this one box and even if the MacBook is off or away on vacation another iTunes-aware box like the Mac Mini or Apple Airports could play off the RAID. It would be a great relief for the tiny hard drive of the Mac laptop to be lightened of it’s 13 gig load and well expanded to the potential 30 gig plus that is out there.
With the purchase of the RAID the network grew to house 4 gigabit NICs; the MacBook, work laptop, Mac Mini, and RAID. I also purchased a small 5 port Gigabit switch to serve as fast backbone between these devices. It’s not worthwhile yet to replace all of the 10/100 equipment yet with 10/100/1000, but this will offer quick transfer between the boxes that can run that fast.