One of the things I like about SD-DVD is the ease with which you can copy them to hard disks and make media servers. Your physical DVD essentially becomes your backup media. With the studios' (IMO irrational) obsession with customer lockdown and DRM, and inanities like Vista, is this something I'll be able to do with the HD formats?

There's some degree of 'managed copy' in both formats, I believe, but exactly what that means and how it'll work remains unseen.

That and while 4gb was manageable, it's difficult to manage 30gb worth of data for a single movie.

For now. When DVD was released a 4GB hard drive was considered large.

That's only a little more than triple a dual-layer DVD-9, which a lot of movies are shipped in these days. Television season sets create a much bigger problem in terms of storage capacity. At 15GB per hour that's ~300GB total for a 22 episode season. That's a mighty big RAID if you watch much television.