The August 1st, 2005 edition of InfoWorld has an interesting article about a new technology that looks like it will kill NAS (Network attached storage) as we know it today.  Currently NAS devices have drive controllers embedded in them and function like mini file servers on the network.  Zetera has created a solution that lets you put drives on the network that act like a SAN (Storage Attached Network).  The IP network becomes the pipeline directly to the disk.  This provides 2 awesome features.

#1 No controller needed in the drive enclosure significantly reducing cost and improving performance.
#2 The drives are seen to the local PC just like any physically attached hard disk, but without special, expensive hardware.

Additionally these drives can be mirrored and support other RAID configurations.

Netgear has a box coming any day that will host 2 IDE drives on the network using this technology.  It is slated at $129 retail and I can't wait to get one.  I look forward to seeing how it performs with applications an other things like that loaded onto it.  It may be the ideal data drive in the sky.  It would be interesting is the drive could be mounted before the OS loads, but I don't see how that would possible without a special NIC that could tell your BIOS it was a drive controller.  They are probably working on that if they don't have it already.