Adobe CS 4 Design Premium, Part 1

I finally bit the bullet. I bought a student version of Adobe CS 4 Design Premium. I’ve been thinking I need to get Illustrator for the diagrams I create for my research. OmniGraffle works great for flowcharts and block diagrams but sometimes I wish I had just a little more control. The other thing is editing photos. Obviously, Photoshop is the big raging beast for that. So, now I’m committed. We’ll see what happens. I can already say this may push my notebook over the brink. The 160 GB drive is bursting at the seams and all I can do is eyeball the SSD stuff that doesn’t come close to enough capacity in anything I could reasonably justify spending money on. I’m thinking this stuff will be reserved for desktop use, but then those drives are bursting at the seams too.

When will someone finally solve this storage issue I’ve been having ever since my first computer (two massive 360K 5.25 in floppy drives if you are wondering what storage I had)? All I want is RAID with emphasis on the R and I. I want to be able to tolerate a single drive failure with no data loss. I want to be able to swap out drives for larger drives with no data loss. I don’t want to take out a second mortgage to do this, and I just want it all to work without to much thinking about it. Is that too much to ask?