If you really want to protect your data, RAID (Mirrored hard drives) is a great option, besides an external hard drive like the Western Digital MyBook. These videos will help you to setup Raid volumes in Windows XP Pro. The videos come in three parts.

This is nit-picking for a lovely device that provides 5TB of storage in a relatively compact form, but why did Lacie call it the "Biggest S2S"? What happens when they release a bigger one? Anyways, here are the specs:

• Standard 5TB storage, scalable to 20TB (via links with other units)
• Full RAID support
• 3Gb/sec eSATA interface
• eSATA-eSATA direct connection
• 200MB/sec burst rate
• Hot-swappable disks

The basic model with PCI-X is $3,699, which is a bit but reasonable for that amount of storage. HD video editors are probably already drowning in their own drool over this monster.

Four SATA bays is better than two, I’d say, and so the Lanner NS04-3100 already has something over the QNAP TS-209 reviewed earlier (and, they even share the same hokey naming schemes). And, it looks like it will compete fairly well on features, as well, with Wi-Fi, iTunes server, UPnP AV media server, DLNA, and support for all meaningful RAID configurations and JBOD. Looks like the NAS server market is becoming enticingly competitive. Pricing and availability information is pending.

Okay, maybe not just for me, but since I’m a SOHO kind of guy, the QNAP TS-209 NAS server sure fits the bill. Sporting two hot-swappable bays, a 500MHz processor, 128MB of DDR2 RAM cache,  gigabit Ethernet, and up to 2TB of storage. And that’s just the hardware. Check out the server capabilities:

• File server
• FTP server
• Backup server
• RAID-1 Mirroring with Hot-swap design
• Remote Replication
• Web server
• MySQL server
• Printer server
• UPnP Media server
• Photo Sharing
• Download Station
• iTunes server
• Cross-platform support
• Scads of security

Coming soon for probably a fair amount of cash.

Okay, some things are just extravagant, you know? Almost embarassingly so. Consider the specs on the new Toshiba Qosmio G45-AV680: HD DVD-R3 drive, USB HD tuner, Santa Rosa Intel PM965 chipset, Core 2 Duo T7300, 2GB RAM,  nVidia GForce 8600 GT 512MB, dual 160GB HDD, all current and future wireless standards, webcam, Harmon Kardon 4-speaker system with subwoofer,  and obligatory fingerprint reader. Whew! It’ll cost you: $3,199, but if you’re in the market for the notebook that has everything (except SSD, I do notice), the Qosmio might be your cup of tea.