Hey, I am a straight shooter, and occassionally that gets people's panties in a wad - I am used to it. 😀 I am glad that you noticed that I did do the math and 30Mtransperday does equal 20.8Ktransperminavg. And you are certainly correct in that I was indeed trying to give you the best advice I thought possible - especially the one about hiring a pro to guide you.

Now, a direct response to your question about NAS/SAN/DAS. If you are not in need of clustering, I would get a direct box that can hold 14-16 drives (both dell and HP and prolly others have very good boxes of this ilk). Don't waste money on ones that do support clustering since they usually cost more. 15Krpm drives, SCSI or SAS. Most important thing is get the best controller you can with the max onboard cache. PCIe 4x minimum speed, possibly multiple controllers attached if you really need high throughput. Add in clustering certification requirement if you need it. You may need multiple drive boxes for optimal throughput for the different I/O needs of sql server (data files, log files, tempdb files). Consider using a NAS box with dedicated network connection for backups - slower, cheaper, larger SATAII drives will suffice here. Cheap and effective and you don't waste room or throughput on your drives used for sql data.