Archiving

Hi All,
I'm building an archiving applicaition for my small organization, but I have many file types such as videos, photos, texts, pdfs... and some huge file sizes of about 500 MB.
My questions are:
1. Somefriend told me that there is a hardware compression device which can compress allready compressed videos and JPEGs. Is it correct? If so, where can I surf to find such devices?
2. Which datatype have I to use with SQL Server 2000 to handle all the different file types and sizes?

Thanks very much
HaythamAny answer there?|||1. I'd be surprised if such a thing exists. Ask your friend to be more specific.

2. I'd guess binary or varbinary. I have no experience storing binaries in sql-server though.|||Store raw datafiles as text or image datatypes.