What sort of cost investment is a ME Drive, Controller, and Interface, plus maybe a few disks? Sounds like this would pretty much obviate my entire storage room, if it can hold as much as DW20's spotlight suggested it could. Even without getting into the crafting aspect of it, which would be later-game, but incredibly awesome, just being able to store that much stuff in such a compact area would be amazing.
Is it something that could be done before hitting the Nether? I'm thinking my progression is typically: Initial Base -> initial mine for minerals -> Industrial infrastructure for ore refining -> Nether. I'd like to slide this in somewhere after my initial infrastructure (pulverizer/furnace) is set up, and set up the output to go straight onto disk. Then, once I hit the Nether, I can get some EnderChests going to send everything straight onto 'chip'.
Nothing in the *early game* AE system requires glowstone, so you can easily get into the system before going to the nether. You will want to control when the system is on more tightly early game before you have enough spare power to let it run all the time. As others have mentioned a simple pressure plate near the access terminal can work well with engines with no startup delay.
Whether you have enough quartz for the system will depend how you mine. Just caving you should come across enough on your way down to diamond level to make the initial infrastructure. In my latest world I was held up on gold. Had the diamonds and almost of stack of quart crystals and dust before finding a good gold vein. First gold vein went almost entirely to TE machines/engines etc. Second gold vein went to AE
AE tool - 2 quarts 1 iron (re-usable tool)
Controller - 1 quartz dust, 4 quartz, 4 iron, 2 redstone, 1 diamond
Drive - 2 quartz dust, 4 iron, 2 glass, 4 redstone, 2 gold
Access Terminal - 1 quartz dust, 2 quartz, 8 Iron, 3 glass, 4 redstone, 1 gold, 1 AE cable
4 Ae cable - 3 quartz dust, 6 glass, 8 redstone
Infrastructure cost:
7 quartz dust, 8 quarts, 1 diamond, 3 gold, 17 iron, 18 redstone, 11 Glass
Plus 1 or more disks:
Storage disk - 1 quartz dust, 4 quartz, 9 redstone, 1 gold, 3 iron, 2 glass
Relative to the system the disks are the most expensive piece. Keep in mind the lower cells are used in making the larger cells -- shift right click a disk to get the storage cell out of the housing. Take the cell from three 1k storage units and add some materials and you get the 4k cell you can add back in the empty housing. Each level is equivalent 3:1 upgrade ratio -- like upgrading runes in diablo II
I think quartz spawns more in the middle layers, so if you just jump down to diamond layer you might miss it and copper/tin. After a gold vein or two you should be set and then its probably time to go to the nether for some glowstone and progress in other mods.
Edit:
For the OCD, I'd probably also add a pre-formatter to the infrastructure cost.
Preformatter - 1 quartz dust, 2 quartz, 1 gold, 9 Iron, 4 redstone, 2 glass
Infrastructure cost (Controller, Access, Drive, Preformatter):
8 quartz dust, 10 quarts, 1 diamond, 4 gold, 26 iron, 22 redstone, 13 Glass
