Networked Hard Drives and Solving the Real Problem
A friend of mine at work uses his laptop to store his photos, etc. Now that’s he’s a recent proud parent, and the fact that he’s run out of space to rip all of his CDs into iTunes with, he’s starting to look at storage options.
His first message to me was “I think I need a Mac”. He went into this whole thing about how he could make these cool photo albums, etc., really though, these types of things aren’t unique to the Macintosh. They just happen to be easier to find since they are built into the iPhoto website.
At any rate, I talked him down from that cliff. It was funny because I had been looking at USB hard drives a few months earlier. Based on discussions with him, I decided to search a little more and found that networked solutions were just as cheap as straight USB solutions…. and IMO much more convenient because you attach them to your router once and never move them… and even more important if you have a laptop: they don’t have to be with you on the kitchen table, taunting your wife 
He ordered the Maxtor unit and it arrived the next day. Turned it on, plugged it into the network, installed the drivers on his laptop, and within 5 minutes he is copying his CD and picture collection to the networked drive. And, most importantly, he is thrilled as this is exactly what he was looking for. Cool, eh?
He mentioned to me that Buy.com has good prices on the Maxtor units now. There are other places online as well.
btw - I have nothing against the Macintosh. My wife has had a Powerbook G4 for a couple of years. She loves it. I have no doubt he would have liked it, and he agrees. Sometimes, though, the challenge is simply finding the solution to the problem rather than reinventing the wheel. The primary challenge was needing more storage. There are in fact other challenges he had, but they weren’t the primary one. Those other challenges do, in fact, have other solutions.
also btw - Online photos were part of the game, but only part. Music, as well as videos were in it as well. And he wanted local copies because he’s paranoid like I am that these types of things can go away if you don’t have your own copy. And things like your first born’s photos going away is a bad thing.