Originally posted by TomTom If you're talking about protecting your images in case of drive failure (mirrored drives) and backing up everything then it's absolutely not cheap. I recently shopped for a smallish 2 drive mirrored enclosure with 6TB drives. It was !$1000 with non-Enterprise level drives. This system would be home to all of my images plus videos, music, and documents, and most people could get away with smaller drive capacity, but if you want something reliable and redundant, not cheap.
Edit: I should add that the cost above doesn't include space for backups, though technically if you're running mirrored drives you always have a current copy.
Pardon me but I do have to chuckle a bit about storage costs. I just retired from doing field service for commercial printing companies. When I started in 1999, I was an on site dedicated service rep for a huge commercial printer that printed magazines like People, Newsweek, Time, US News and World Report, Wired, Sports Illustrated etc. They had a state of the art 20 drive RAID. It could hold an astounding 64 gigibytes of data. The individual drives were SCSI drive that cost over $1,000 dollars apiece. From the RAID, data was transferred to an automated tape storage device the size of a telephone booth, or the Tardis. It was pretty awesome for it's day.
When I purchased my first personal computer in 1983 it was a Radio Shack Model 4 with 64K of RAM and two 184 kilobyte floppy drives.. It cost $2,000. When I was at the store there was a box sitting next to the computer. It was about the size of the original IBM PC and cost $2,300. I looked at and said wow. A 5 megabyte hard drive, My wife said what does that mean. I said it was like having infinite storage.
In keeping with the thread title, If/when I get an F1 I will mostly used it at full resolution. And use pixel shift wherever I can.