With more and more people downloading their entertainment, and photo files getting bigger and bigger (especially if you scan them), a massive amount of hard drive space is becoming a necessity for even the least of us. Fortunately it’s also dirt cheap and plentiful. I’ve been adding hard drives, peace-meal over time, expanding my capacity in small increments; just enough to satisfy my immediate needs.
The easiest solution is to add an external drive, with it’s own enclosure, over a USB (hopefully 2.0) or Firewire connection. These are usually single disk drives, using the same hard drive you’ve got inside your computer, but in it’s own box with it’s own power adapter and data connection (usb or firewire). Some of the bigger drives cram two physical disks into the enclosure, and use a built in controller to combine them into one virtual drive (the volume you see on your desktop). These are the one’s that go up to 500gb and up. Until recently, the largest physical hard drives capacity was 500gb, so any external drive that you could buy that was bigger than that combined at least two smaller drives.
These are great for casual needs; lot’s of space, nothing to think about or configure, and portable to boot. The problem with these drives (and all hard drives) is reliability. Every hard drive will crap out, at some point. There’s a saying that there are two types of computer users: Those who have lost data to hardware failure, and those that will. So why’s that worse with these kind of drives? Because there’s TWO (or more) drives in there, DOUBLING (or quadrupling) the chances that a drive will die and take your data with it.
I have a thing for round containers.
Time for some night shots, for the next couple weeks. Hurray!
An old one from the city I love.
300th photo!
I’m taking off for a week to go to Blissfield for my high school’s 10 year class reunion, which actually got canceled yesterday, so we’re just going to have a party at my folk’s place.
I had planned on writing this big long diatribe about why this site (and all others on my server) have been down for 5+ days and how my hosting company did less than nothing to help recover them and how Mercury is in retrograde but I’m sick of thinking about it so I’ve decided to move on.
I will just point out these few things:
- Backup your sites right now. Files, databases, email, everything. Right now, and as often as you can remember.
- If you also happen to host someone’s site who generates a bit of blushing, especially amongst egyption-islamic-extremist-hackers, maybe put it on a separate server from the rest of your sites.
- Don’t count on your hosting company’s nightly backups to be available if their customer service takes 4 days to respond to requests for said backups (I’m looking at you Site5).
- Back up your shit. Again.
- Don’t expect your hosting company do to much of anything to help you recover anything (still looking at you Site5).
- Back up your shit.
Where I add four drives to my computer.