I agree that drives are now cheap. My tower now has ten drives attached, plus a DVD+R writer and a CD burner. You can see by my attached image that I currently have the following drives attached. 100GB, 120GB, 160GB, 100GB, 45GB, 250GB, 60GB, 120GB, 120GB, and a 40GB (all reported smaller because the operating system considers 1GB as 1,073,741,824 bytes, and drive manufacturers consider 1GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes). That is a total of 1.115TB. I am using two Maxtor Ultra ATA/133 PCI cards for a total of twelve possible drives. I have every cable position filled. I needed more storage so I bought four hard drive removable bays. I have two other 80GB drives, one more 120GB drive, one more 160GB drive, and a few smaller ones that I can switch if I need to. So, I thought about another Ultra ATA/133 PCI card, and do have an available slot, but right now I have drives stuffed everywhere in my six bay tower. I cannot find room for more, and can not find a bigger tower. Also, I do not know if three Ultra ATA/133 cards will play together. When you REALLY run out of space you look for solutions. Compression was such a solution. I have many files and folders compressed on the normal partition drives, and have never had a problem yet witht Windows XP Professional. I do backup critical files on DVD, and critical working files on other hard drives. No files or folder are compressed on the Drivecrypt partitions. I am not sure if it would work or help. So there are times compression can help, and it has worked good for me.