just using cheap drives at the moment - I'm experimenting with refurbs ever since I signed us up for Crashplan. All you can eat cloud backup has me resting easy, and for as much action as those drives see, which is little to none, I figure why spend the extra $. I may eat those words someday but we'll see.
I can backup about 30gb per overnight session - sometimes it gets a bit behind but catches up over the weekend and by the time we're offlining files everything is obviously up there. In fact, they never delete anything, so the crashplan archives are often much much bigger than what I offline locally, since I do a cleanup pass.
I think they charge $150 for sending a drive, which might be good if you had a few old drives you wanted to get on their system in addition to live backup. I really have nothing but good things to say about them but have only been using them for a couple months and have not had to unfreeze anything substantial yet - I'd actually be welcome to hear a horror story just because it seems too good to be true.
I think you want this kind of onsite+offsite redundancy but I do get the Comcast throttling thing. I'm in portland too and haven't noticed them doing that with our business class account.
