My archives are at around 600 gigs these days. It's a combo of models, textures, photo's and what not. The largest being photo's as I use professional gear and the RAW files are huge for each photo. It's not unusual to fill up a half dozen 8gig CF cards in a day. I'm blathering.

The sollution I settled on is a Thermaltake product called BLACX. It connects via eSata (USB is a fossil) and allows me to use SATA drives like a USB flash drive. It holds two hardrives and the computer sees them like an internal drive. You just slip a hard drive into a slot (holds two, but they make one that holds one). My files are saved on both drives in case one fails.

You can buy anti-static cases for hard drives I think are mainly used by network folk, but you have to search and order them over the Internet. Now I keep two harddrives containing the same files until they are full and then throw two more in. I leave then half empty though for performance sake. 1Tb drives are dirt cheap now.

I use USB 32 gig flash drives to transport files between work and home and then place the files on the SATA drives. Because the connection is eSATA it's fast and easy.

I've noticed some external drives have eSATA now. I have some externals but always bought them with firewire connection and now I only use eSATA. Got rid of those nasty slow USB things.

It does not cost me that much compared to what loosing the files would cost me in time, expense and plain old work. One trip to photograph the Redwoods in Northern California cost me over $5,000. I loose that the only option is to spend the money again if needed. If I loose a model I have 100 hours invested in, how do I put a price on that?

Another idea that you may not realize exists. I think that BLACX that holds two SATA drives cost me around fifty dollars at Best Buy. 1 Tb SATA's I manage to find on sale for around a hundred bucks. Two of those (total $250) and I never have to worry about loosing what amounts to many thousands of dollars of stuff and tens of thousands of dollars worth of manhours. Cheap insurance by any estimation.