Delever said: 450GB DV clips, 40GB of music, 137GB of virtual machines, 56GB of TV shows...
Welcome to the age of high quality media ;). Especially when work with media is involved, it kills space fast.
There are ways I could save space, like..
Having on computer exactly those clips I need at the moment for editing.. Clearing up crap from music folder.. Creating smaller disks for virtual machines and wasting additional time if I run out of space..
But question is... save space for what? To have saved space? :)
You could build for only what you need to spend on drives a FreeNAS box out of an old PII or PIII from the rubbish dump. You could use software RAID of one configuration or another so that your important media is more secure, mirrored or RAID 5.
Something I don't like is having gigs of data that is not backed up in some form. When there is so much of it, if you loose it, you will never get it all back, apart from the expense, even if it is only the time & bandwidth, of getting back what you can.