[DanLar75]

Costs of storage are of course declining rapidly, however so far the massive increase in available bandwidth and storage needs for customers is simply growing MUCH faster.

Part of the catch-22 here is also that with decreased storage costs for online storage providers (that increasingly are building their clusters with consumer component hard drives) keeps an even pace with decrease in cost for home-storage and the amount of data users are wanting to upload.

[pangram]

This is why I'm really liking Crashplan as a storage service; they offer the ability to use their software to backup to your friends' drives (and vice versa). It perhaps doesn't work out well for everyone, but I have enough friends that keep up with the latest hardware that I am assured of finding someone with which I can trade backup storage. (My alternate plan was dropping off a disk / picking up the old disk whenever I visited my relatives every couple of weeks!)