With the unprecedented proliferation of high-speed communication services many people will have high-speed access to virtually unlimited amounts of information in many forms of media. A tremendous amount of research effort is being applied to the problems of how to provide these multi-media services to tens and hundreds of thousands of concurrent users. The I/O problems alone are significant and represent a form of data intensive computing. This paper attempts to place analytical boundaries on the problems of designing and building a scalable multimedia storage server. The result is a compelling case for network attached storage as well as a set of equations that can be used to estimate the hardware requirements for such a system.