The thing about anime is, for most of it, it's not illegal at all. It's all fansubbed stuff, and it isn't licensed in the US, which means the only way for us to get it (subbed) is to download. I myself have quite a collection rabbit, but I've not got the space you do, so I usually burn to DVDs once I'm finished with a series.
The other problem is, since there are so many releases daily, a lot of the old torrents aren't seeded, so you have to resort to crappy irc downloads from some 56k user in Europe or something to that effect. Rabbit, I know somebody who's hd recently crashed, and I believe he got his avis back, so I'll ask him what he did and see if that will be of any help.