it’s amazing, but in the next three to six months the cost of storage is going to drop again, especially managed storage. using direct attached PATA or SATA drives is OK for the individual user, but when you get your multiple workgstations online, and the 120 GB storage capacity is all of a sudden 2048 GB, and the data is mission critical, so you require redundancy, recovery, and backup, the puzzle gets more exciting and often times very expensive.
apple answered this management problem with its Xserve RAID and Xsan solutions, but at costs approaching $2.50 a GB, it is quite expensive. i have found SAN products starting around $0.50 and the infrastucture is not fibre channel (FC), but well understood gigabit ethernet (1GbE), so instead of $10,000 on equipment, you can spend $500 and get near similar results (instead of FC protocol you use iSCSI).
these types of topologies are just starting to appear from netgear and dlink, and i’ll be ready for them.