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

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I CAN HAZ TERRABYTE?

[xannoside.livejournal.com]

You could also just unsubscribe from those emails. :P

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Seriously. A couple of these, and I've got the storage space for my own LOTR trilogy.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

But how would I learn about stuff otherwise!?

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

You can never have too much memory. Ever. I have...oh...a 250 gig hard drive and a 250 gig external hard drive, plus my 160 gig iPod, and I've used up pretty much all of it.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

See! You need this stuff! Really!

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

I have an 80 gig hard drive, and an 80 gig external drive whose only purpose is to back up the contents of the hard drive. Apparently, I'm doing something wrong. I can't figure out what I'd do with a terabyte of memory.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Compumachines storage: ur doin' it wrong.

No, you're not. You just probably do delete things on occasion. Me, not so much.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Well, the reason both the hard drive and the external drive are full is because one backs up the other. I also have an ancillary music backup on the iPod. Let's see, probably 80 or 90 gigs of it are music, and another 100 or so for television shows (since I only follow some by downloading, like Heroes).

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Why delete when the marginal cost of storage is so small?

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Exactly! And there was a very good chance that I was going to watch Smallville season five again. Really, no, a very good...chances were better than 5 to 1 that...

Okay, there was no reason to have that saved. Or Prison Break. (But I, uh, kept Prison Break. Because I might just finish the series, even though season three was terrible from what I saw.)

[xannoside.livejournal.com]

By using teh internets!

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

::whines:: but that would mean I would have to look for it!!!

[xannoside.livejournal.com]

Well, then let me console you with the fact that the 1TB drive you looked is not that good.

I will not tell you why, thus casting all future emails of this nature from buy.com in doubt!

Mwahahahaha!

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

.....NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

[hslayer.livejournal.com]

You seriously could use a RAID array. One failure and you'd be hosed.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

? I don't know what that is. Why does one failure hose me? Most of my hard drives aren't connected unless I'm using them, so I don't think power surge failure is likely. I'm also pretty careful with them when they're not in use...

[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.

[saikogrrl.livejournal.com]

I have that 1Tb one! It is called Severus. XD It fills up pretty fast though, I have 300gig of anime already lol.

I also bought a pretty red WD 160gig one because the 1Tb isn't very portable for when I want to leech stuff of friends' computers. :D (I called it Lily XD)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Heh, I have the 320 GB blue one. His name is Basil. He joins Ambrose, the computer, Horatio and Webley the external, home-based hard drives, and Stokeley, Alistair, Kendrick, and Eustace, the USB Keys.

[saikogrrl.livejournal.com]

Hahahaha, I haven't named my usb keys. XD

Also, you're right to prefer WD, as awesome as the 2TB one would be, the WD one is soooo much prettier. :D

[moonlightalice.livejournal.com]

*blink*
What the hell is ON your hard drives?! I have an 80GB hard drive and it's half empty...

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Lots and lots of TV shows. And easily 20+GB of music. And did I mention that I never delete anything?

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

Once you get up to 80GB and larger, you can't kill a hard drive on just music, unless you're Ivy and have more CDs than God. Poorly-compressed pdfs of rpg game books can help things along (Six gigs of Dragon Magazine!) but even that, you'd be hard-pressed. No, it's entire seasons of TV shows that'll kill ya.

(Of course, now I'm vaguely tempted by the possibility of all this space I don't need. And I need to start considering a laptop purchase, as we'll need one for the cruise we're going on next March.)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Each TV show season is easily 3-4GB. But funny you should mention "more mp3s than God." Because I may not have listened to all of them, but I've got entire artist discographies for surprisingly prolific musicians. You'd be surprised how many albums Judas Priest, for example, has. And, like I said, I never delete anything, at least not until I listen to it and sort what I like or not. Um yeah, gonna get around to that any day now.

[xannoside.livejournal.com]

Once you take the plunge, you'll be filling it up with tons of shit.

Especially once you have a new computer that can actually do stuff, like watch HD-streaming movies.

I have movies, music, and games filling mine up.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

It's a fact: if you buy more space, you will develop a tendency to fill it. This has been true of Microsoft programs as computer hard drives have gotten bigger. MSWord takes up some redonkulous chunk of space these days. (I blame the stupid paperclip!)

[xannoside.livejournal.com]

I'm more concerned about the growing tendency of programs to actually require the Intel Core 2 Duo CPU chipset. 'Cause those upgrades are definitely not cheap.

It used to be that processors grew so fast the CPU speed requirement for programs was basically a non-issue, but when they switched to the multi-core threading tech back in Core Duo instead of just making stuff faster, they really changed the game for how programs optimally behave on computer systems.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

::blinks::

[xannoside.livejournal.com]

CPUs actually matter now, and are much more expensive to upgrade (if they can be upgraded at all!) than just adding another hard-drive.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Better.

[xannoside.livejournal.com]

Sorry. -_-;

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Oh, well, it's nice to know that you think my comprehension of computer stuff is better than it is. I must be faking it really good.

[xannoside.livejournal.com]

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Aw, I haz a lolcat.