cheapo cdrom servers (Score 1)

There was a writeup in the Linux Gazette on this a few months ago; you can find it at http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue34/jachim.html . They basically added a secondary IDE controller to a normal Linux PC, for a total of 4 ide channels, and filled all the spare IDE units with CDRom drives for a total of 7 cdroms and whatever fit on the boot drive served. The biggest trick was probably finding a large enough case, but we're all getting good at that by now, right? By combining this approach with the first one suggested (copying CD contents to a big honkin IDE hard drive) you could get an extremely large amount of storage on line for very little money. And yes, Virginia, performance under heavy load would suck, and no you would not want to do something silly like this with your main mail, home directory, or SQL server; with a reasonable amount of traffic the machine's usefulness for other tasks would become extremely limited due to the amount of interrupt activity generated by those 4 IDE channels. However, it would be one very cost effective way to get a large amount of data dependably available and on-line.

$.02