Gadgets I'm Currently Drooling Over

(a.k.a. the UMF - the "Unseen Mystical Force" that causes you to want to buy stuff as quoted by the TiVo Community Forums)

Sun Microsystems Sunfire V100 1U server

This is Sun's low end Sparc server with IDE drives that starts at around $1000.  It's essentially a headless server (meaning no video card), but it can be managed entirely through a serial console cable.  It also lacks a pci slot, and has dual ethernet ports.

3Ware 12 port Escalade 8500-12 Serial ATA IDE Raid controller

3Ware also makes a 4 and an 8 port controller.  This RAID controller supports up to 12 drives and can 2 terabytes(!) of drive space per controller.  Personally, I'd love to have one of these at home, but then I wouldn't have any idea of what to do with all that space... (Hmmm... Greg, are you listening to this?)

Canopus ADVC-100 DV bridge (analog composite s-video to IEEE-1394 firewire converter)

If you've ever wanted to archive old video tapes or capture video from your TiVo and put it into your computer to burn it to a DVD later, this is a good way to go.  You can take the analog (composite or s-video) from your ol' VCR and it will convert it to a digital signal that you can capture through Firewire.  As someone who still has some old VHS tapes (some of which are no longer in print), this is a fantastic way to back up your irreplaceable movies.

Apple iPod

Need I say more?  This is one of the coolest (if not THE coolest) mp3 player currently out on the market.  At $500 (half the price of the lowest iBook) for the 20GB version, it's also one of the priciest.  This may be completely wishful thinking, but I'm personally waiting for Apple to come out with a color version that plays video.

Shuttle SB51G

Okay, okay, I know I already have a Shuttle SS40G, an SK41G and an SS51G.  I just think adding the SB51G would be a welcome addition to the family and would look good in my rack.  Unfortunately, I can't justify the purchase because I really have enough computers as it is... ;-)

AMI StorTrends NAS Software

I haven't seen this around at any of the computer stores or shows, but a product like this certainly has a lot of appeal to me.  I discovered this one day when I decided to look for some linux-based Network Appliance Server software thinking there must be some sort of open-source project that would allow me to set up a box with a bunch of hard drives so I could have some centralized storage for my home network.

Well, this isn't free at $300, but this looks like it could potentially be a good solution for putting together a system with a few large IDE drives into a small office for a workgroup server that only needs some basic centralized file sharing features.  It has client compatibility with Windows, appletalk, NFS, Netware, etc., and doesn't require any specific client access licensing.  I don't know the details of this particular program, but it's been my experience that Network Attached Storage devices only have share-level permissions available and you can't nest the permissions in underlying folders.  The other thing Only thing is, make sure to check the hardware compatibility list to make sure that you have hardware that AMI will support.  It looks like they also just released a version that runs on Linux that has some Active Directory features.