I agree with you in your situation. However, we have terabytes of images and the business loves to keep them for 10 years (even though they don't go back to them with the application). We have poor man's partitioning going on with 1 read-write database, several 100GB read-only, and a view that ties them all together. I am confident in our backups of the file share.

Our issue does not have to do with space, it is a number of things outside of that. One is the speed at which the images are retrieved. We also have several "customers" that scrape our databases. Finally, it is licensing for SQL Server 2012 and the box itself.

The CLR is just an interim while the developers create their own application layer to take the retrieved file path and grab the image. Their resources are not able to do it now, but we need to get these images out and virtualize the server before our true up.

I also look at this as a chance to learn clr and C# a bit more for myself.