I have a new hard drive. Details and photos below the fold.
You may remember that, right at the beginning of my freshman year, I bought two new hard drives. Along with the 200 GB drive in my laptop, that gave me 360 GB of “online” (usable) storage plus 1TB for backup. Well, I’m happy to report that I have completely used the 360 GB available to me, and the backup drive is nearly full with backups and a few other things. It’s time to expand.
Instead of going for another medium-size drive, I decided to go all-out and get a new backup drive. I went with the 1.5 TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA internal drive. Along with it, I got a Macally G-S350SUAB FireWire 400/800, USB 2.0, and eSATA enclosure to turn the new drive into an external drive.
After I had set up the drive, I had to clone the contents of the old backup drive to the new one. This amounted to about 850 GB of data. The cloning process took seven hours over a daisy-chained FireWire 800 connection. I had hoped that I could then start using the drive, but no dice. As soon as it finished cloning, it had to verify the cloned data, a process that took an additional four hours. After that, I had to delete the old backup files off the old backup drive, a process that took overnight to finish.
Now that that’s over with, the new drive will be strictly for backup, and I now have a full terabyte of empty space to put more stuff on. As George Carlin would say, “you’ve got more gigabytes than you’ve got stuff! You’ve gotta get more stuff!“
Oh, and the best thing about this setup was the price. I spent over $250 a year and a half ago for a 1TB drive, and that was actually two 500 GB drives in one box so it’s loud and heavy. The new 1.5 TB drive was $129 on Amazon, plus about $80 for the case that has FireWire 800. That’s about $50 less for half again as much storage and twice the convenience. Tomorrow it will probably be half that price.
Here are some photos I took while I was putting the drive in its case. You can also see these shots up on flickr.
I had planned to get this post up sooner, but I had to process the photos first, and to do that I had to clear off space on my computer to store them, and to do that I had to offload stuff to the external drives, and to do that I had to wait for the clone to finish. *whew!*
March 13th, 2009 - 2:46 pm
You’ve got files on laptop, files on backup, files in storage, files in college–YOU’VE GOT SHIT ALL OVER THE WORLD!
March 13th, 2009 - 11:03 pm
Close up art photos of your new hard drive. What a geek!!!
March 14th, 2009 - 7:36 am
At least he isn’t printing full-scale posters of his new hard drive to put around his room
March 14th, 2009 - 12:17 pm
Don’t give him any ideas.
March 14th, 2009 - 12:47 pm
http://pcweenies.com/2008/08/06/geek-rituals-unboxing/
March 14th, 2009 - 12:52 pm
Yes! I get the bonus points for using twitter!
March 14th, 2009 - 8:50 pm
I don’t know which is more amazing, that the comic exists or that you guys found it, or that others commented on it, or that I am now? Is this a sign of the apocalypse?
March 17th, 2009 - 11:00 am
It’s The Geekalypse!
But you need to include something in the photos for scale, so we can all marvel at how tiny it is.
OK, so now take it apart and start all over…..
(tell the truth, you were just looking for an excuse, right?).
October 7th, 2009 - 7:09 pm
You’re too young to know that PC hard drives started out in 1982 at around 5 MB. By 1987 that increased to 20 MB. When I first got a 200 MB hard drive I thought that was a lot. I remmeber paying $289 for a 540 MB hard drive and thinking that was cheap. Anyway taking pictures of PC equipment is only useful if you plan to sell them on ebay or another web site. Otherwise the pictures are boring.
October 7th, 2009 - 7:43 pm
If they’re boring, don’t look at them.
Besides, it was about the photography, not the drive. The self-imposed assignment was to try to take interesting pictures of a mostly-mundane object. I don’t know if I succeeded, and I’d probably do it differently now, but that was the idea anyway.
October 7th, 2009 - 8:02 pm
Nice depth of field going on there. What camera do you use?
October 7th, 2009 - 9:09 pm
Dude, you should be photographing BABES! omg wut a nurd.
October 7th, 2009 - 10:12 pm
Gabe, it was my Nikon D80 with a 30-odd-year-old Nikon 105mm f/2.8 that I bought freshman year. I don’t remember if I used a flash to light it or not.
Ryan, I think Apollo has the market covered:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8827867@N03/sets/