[Sorry to be repetitive at the frequency of 1/year] This is experimental data which is immutable once aquired; read: it does not change anyore, ever. It is also not read very often and less so the older it gets. It also needs no high-speed access, we have copies of it in databases for that. The costs of keeping it around are roughly: equipment + ops time. It appears that particular equipment (netapps filer), which is easy to operate, becomes too expensive. It might be a good idea to invest a little ops time in a cheap storage boxes for stuff that does not need filer-quality storage. ATA disks are available at about half a Euro per Gigabute in units of 300GB. Thus it is possible to put up about a Terabyte of storage in any simple Wintel box. Slightly more without redundancy, slightly less with software RAID. Any (old) Wintel box will be fine. The equipment cost will be negligible: EUR600/terabyte if you use old wintel boxes, otherwise add the cost of the simplest wintel box. When building a couple of them and operating them all the same, the ops cost will not be too high. One does not even need RAID. Just build two of them and have a cron job rsyncing between them for full hot redundancy. Name them cheapfiler-1 and cheapfiler-1-copy, make the copy read-only to users. Make as many as we need. Spread them around for physical redundancy. Not rocket science. What's the problem? Daniel