All this means
that the modern way to large capacity is to combine
lots of (physically) small drives -- in other words, RAID. That also
gives you fault tolerance, and increased performance by putting more
heads to work.
RAID is certainly the way to go. I'm sort of tempted to
try it out on my home system sometime but there's always
been something else to do first!
I can vouch for (and suggest ;-) the Infortrend boxes... they do
EIDE drives on the inside (my units have 14 drives each) and do
either LVD SCSI (U160) or FC on the outside. All the usual RAID
gadgets are present in the box' firmware.
--f