Fuck yooooouuuuu Buy.com!!!!

[trinityvixen]

I nearly choked when I saw this come up in my e-mail.

As it happens, I was transferring files off my computer last night and I ran into a little snag: my 500 GB external hard drive was full. I deleted a few seasons worth of shows I didn't need to watch again (or that I had purchased in the interim or that darkling1 had). But full! Jesus. I have my old hard drive, and my 320GB portable one is still going strong...

BUT 1 TB!!!!! It's a good thing I have this irrational bias for Western Digital or I would have had a heart attack when I scrolled down to this.

I think they're onto me at Buy.com. I seem to get an awful lot of my daily e-mail taken up with digital storage options. In the same e-mail, I was told about this, which I still want despite the fact that this was supposed to take care of my travel-storage needs. (But the new one is so small.) And now that I'm using a 2GB SD card to watch things on my portable DVD player, this sort of thing (and this) have suddenly been added to the mix.

Buy.com, don't you know my kitty was ill? I can't afford to be tempted like this. Especially not as I'm of this particularly unfortunate mindset where this sort of ridiculous, needless purchase isn't tempting except in moments where I've already tossed that much or more out the window. (Damn you, kitty bladder obstruction! YOU ARE SAPPING MY WILL POWER!!!) I can resist anything until I've already spent as much or more on an expense that I couldn't help. (taxes, vet stuff, rent...)

Comments

[hslayer.livejournal.com]

A hard drive failure isn't necessarily likely, but they do happen, and usually if a drive fails, you lose all the data on it.

RAID is a way of using multiple disks to provide redundancy. It can be as simple as connecting two disks instead of one and writing all data to both (but obviously you only get half the capacity) or as complex as smearing the data over multiple disks along with additional information that can be used to reconstruct any lost data if a drive fails (in this case you lose only one disk's capacity in a setup usually with 3 or 4 disks). On my home server, with 4 250GB disks providing me with 750GB usable storage. If any one of those 4 drives fails, I don't lose a thing.

You can search buy.com (or elsewhere) for "RAID NAS" for what'd probably be your simplest option if you wanted to go this route, though there are other ways to do it (for example, using an old PC as a server like I have).

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

That sounds way complicated for my processes. I generally redundantly save anything precious or particularly, painstakingly compiled (my original writing, school/other paperwork, mp3s). Everything else is sort of that pack-rat in me attacking a new medium and storing stuff I could probably live easily without. I think I'm okay.

[hslayer.livejournal.com]

Once it's set up, the hardware does it for you, and it just looks like one huge drive. But so long as you've got stuff you care about backed up, you're fine.