Digital Home Thoughts: Sony's Home Server Stores One-Terabyte

"A terabyte of storage sounds like something a missile base may need, but Sony has started selling a consumer device with that much room. The Vaio Type X, which is available only in Japan, is a home server that contains four 250GB hard drives: two for PC files and two others for audiovisual materials such as stored TV programs and music. The machine, which costs about $5,000, also comes with seven TV tuners and a special interface that lets consumers see thumbnails of what they record."

Hmm, this solution is a bit expensive, IMHO. You can pick up a 300GB SATA 7200rpm drive for about $230 which means you can get 1TB of storage for about $920. Of course two things to mention here if you wanted to build something similar yourself - one is that if you put this on a RAID controller, you will essentially be getting less storage due to the RAID requirements (so presumably Sony is setting up these drives as JBOD); and secondly you will have to buy the RAID controller yourself. So why is Sony charging so much? Probably for the nifty looks of the device and for those seven TV tuners, 8O and the extra software. I am not really convinced whether it is worth $5K. This device will be available in Japan for now only, but Sony is researching whether it should bring it here to the US.