Digital Home Thoughts: The Frugal Storage Geek

"If a grand is out of budget, and you have a spare tower, you can build a network file server fairly easily. Windows Home Server may be the easiest, but has limitations that you will need to investigate. If you're a little more adept, anything from a default linux install to one of the customized distros will serve you well and will run well enough on years old hardware."

So not everyone has money for a Drobo or Synology device to pack their favourite memories. When your budget is tight, finding ways to store a lot of data gets more challenging. The mass mind from LifeHacker puts forth a lot of good ideas though many of them involve a few hours or more of setup. Most of the solutions include networking which makes the most sense if the data you want needs frequent accessing, though if you are looking for archiving data, just going with bare hard drives is probably the cheapest way to go.