One of the members of my LUG found this product:

http://www.rebyte.com/

I might try this once I get a new primary machine. This is definitely more practical than a tape drive and a hell of lot more faster. The remote access to your files is a nice feature as well.

$150 is pretty steep.

I know for a fact that the hardware they are using (IDE Compact Flash Adapter) can't cost more than $25 or so, because I only pay $20 for the ones I use on my embedded machines.

And anyway, you should be able to create the same thing with any distro out there. It must be Samba and NFS connecting to shares on the desktops, and a cron job that runs rsync every 5 minutes, plus software RAID, $150 would really be a waste for something you could have running yourself in a few hours.

You could even put it on a CF card and use an IDE adapter like they did, if you wanted.

P.S.

It is also most likely much slower than a tape drive. There are tape drives that can do 20 MB per second, which would blow 100BaseT out of the water.

Well this is targeted at people who want the convenient setup and use of such a system. You could also build a router with an old machine running linux with a couple network cards. You can also go out and buy a router/firewall combo from linksys for $60. You can also put together your own PVR with mythtv instead of buying a tivo. This is an example of a company using linux to put out their product. Linux is being used more and more by electronics firms as well. My dish network system is running linux. It uses a system called opentv customized for dish network. This is all good.