Naturally I'd be keeping the 'best of' shots and organizing them by category.  That said, I have nearly a full TB of photos taken over the last ~4 years.  Considering a good chunk of that is taken at high frame rates to capture action cycling and the like on firearms, the vast percentage is 'junk' photos.

Growing up on film, I was always told to hold onto every negative though, so it feels weird to consider deleting probably 600gb of files.  What are your thoughts on all this?  I figure if they aren't the top few percent in quality and will never get edited, why keep them.

My Personal solution is to buy another TB HD.  I have 2-3 2 TB HDs for each of the last few years. Fill one up, label it, put it in a box with the rest and buy another.

Magnetic storage can get fucky with age.  Not to mention that's money I don't have at the moment.  I the future I plan on having a 15-20tb NAS in the safe though.  I've already got nearly 8tb of stuff between 3 drives at the moment. 

Cull out photos....

Sometimes I'd like to cull out everything I own. Life was a lot simpler when I didn't have anything.

Storage is (relatively) cheap, compared to that "DRAT!" feeling when you go looking for something you shot decades ago but realize you trashed.

Zack makes a great point as well about applying new skills to old shots; I occasionally go through some old ones and reprocess with my current skillset.

culling takes hours better spent shooting moar pictures

True, but when 90% of them are nearly duplicates taken at 7fps, it's kind of redundant to keep the extras is my thought.

back in the day, a 36 exposure roll of film really kept the motor drive in check

I got a QNAP Turbo NAS with 16 TB.  In RAID 10 configuration that's just under 8 TB of actual storage.   I'm set for pictures,  GoPro and Phantom video,  music,  etc.  And it's more reliable storage than a plain old external drive.   I still back it up but RAID is nice.   The best part is access.   I run multiple media servers on the QNAP and can access pictures, video,  and music through my PS3.  It's great.   Something like that and you won't be worrying about storage volume for a while I imagine.

I'm at 8tb right now between all my storage.  Planning on having 5.5tb internal (5tb regular and a 500gb SSD) when I build a new desktop.  Plus whatever I can get external.

I recommend a RAIDed NAS with more bays and/or bigger drives than I have.  Get something with 12 or more TB actual storage after accounting for what is used up by the RAID configuration.   Good NAS devices offer so much more than storage.   I find it way more flexible than high storage volume on aPC.

I think you're on the right course with culling out the photos that you will never edit. For example, just a couple weekends ago I shot over 1000 photos at Mount Vernon's revolutionary war re-enactment. Before editing any of them, I'm going through the set to ID the keepers. Once those are selected, the rest are killed. Permanently. Never to be seen - nor missed - again. I submit you will not regret deleting the non-keepers. After all, if you liked it enough to edit, you probably would have already edited it.  

Yes, it will take time to cull the collection, but chew it a bite at a time and it will be done eventually. 

This opinion is worth twice what you paid.  

Culling the photos is an important skill that all photographers need to develop.

If you are shooting lots of images using a high frame rate, you naturally have lots of images that you neither want nor need. One or two of the burst are worth keeping, the rest are junk.

I shoot lots of sports, running about 1200-2000 per day for an all day event.
During the initial culling:
5% are immediately deleted due to technical problems that cannot be fixed in post processing, usually out of focus.
50% are judged to have artistic problems and will eventually be deleted, "grade B".
The remaining 45% "grade A" are judged good enough to be sorted and potentially processed.
Any sorting and organizing at the file level happens here for the grade A photos.
The grade A images are imported into Lightroom.
A second round of triage picks the photos that will be publicly available for viewing (3+stars, 30-50% of the grade A).
These 3+ photos are processed and exported, the JPG files are uploaded to my website and to the event organizers as needed.
The grade B photos are deleted from the hard drive.
The grade A photos and their exports are backed up to external drives and to DVD, and eventually removed from the original hard drive.

My personal photos do through the same process, but the grade A photos will remain on the hard drive.

Your grade B photos will never get processed and will never be shown to anyone, thus there is no sense keeping them. If a few of them have sentimental value, bump them into the grade A category, then release the disk space to something useful.

Your files need to be backed up onto multiple drives. This covers the most common problem, drive failure, which I have had happen.
Off-site storage is a good idea as it guards against things like house fires. I don't bother as this is a risk I am willing to take. My website can serve this purpose for many of my images.

I let Lightroom run all night to import the photos into the catalog.  The next few days are going to be doing a lot of sorting and killing I think.