Forget USB and FireWire. I want one of these Terabyte Hot Drives from Evergreen Technologies:
The TeraByte HotDrive is based on the latest Serial ATA RAID technology. By incorporating this new data transfer technology, the HotDrive delivers the large storage capacity demanded by today’s data intensive computing at speeds that will support your productivity requirements. Evergreen’s HotDrive storage products are the ideal answer for audio and video production studios, cad design, database management, and small home and office networks.
Our four bay drive enclosures measure 10″ High x 7″ Wide x 15″ Deep.
The entry-level 1000 GB (1 terabyte) drive array is under a grand. Thomas Hawk, this might be the solution for your massive music collection!
Ed Bott 
Seems interesting. I’d buy something like this in a heartbeat — if I could somehow guarantee reliability. All of these hard drive manufacturers claim that their hard drives are better and more reliable than others and then I’m disappointed.
Ed, what would make this set up any more reliable than other drives?
My experience. I’ve had multiple Maxtor drives fail. I then tried a Cobra drive which has failed. I bought a LaCie 500gig and it had the worst copy errors ever so I took it back within my 2 week limit at CompUSA. I just recently bought a 400 gig Seagate external and already it is malfunctioning. I haven’t lost data on it yet but all of a sudden it will just disapear as a connected drive, even though it is still connected via USB2, and when I turn the drive on and off sometimes the file sharing settings are gone and I have to re-enable them. It also makes a suspect high pitched whirring noise from time to time.
Perhaps I’ve just had bad luck but I’ve got to believe that there is a better answer. If this is a better answer sign me up but I’d be interested in what would make this a more reliable product. I couldn’t find much on it on their site.
Tom
What would make this setup more reliable than other drives? The biggest difference is that it plugs directly into a SATA disk controller, which is specifically designed for high-performance storage applications. All the other external solutions use a USB or FireWire bus which then goes into an IDE bus. Although this drive is external, it is no different from an internal drive in this respect.
Tom, I’m with you, I’d love to rush toward the terabyte side of the universe. But with so many persistent HD failures, maybe you should check your computing environment; that is, is the room too hot, is your power supply powerful enough, is the room excessively dusty, do you stack your HDs right on top of one another and so on? With so many failures, you’re the victim of probability.