Monday 26 February 2007

Pic of the day: New king of the hill! But who died and made this Storagebird king?

New hard disk

I finally got my external hard disk back. Except it was not the same disk. Well, of course not, they are pretty hard to repair and easy to replace. But it is not even the same brand. Expert seems not to sell LaCie anymore, which is understandable if they all collapse in half a year. Instead they had a corresponding (250GB) Storagebird. For a very reasonable NOK 300 (roughly $50) I could get a 400GB instead, which I fairly happily accepted. Gigabytes are always good to have, right?

Despite the ridiculous name (Storagebird?? Does it have feathers or lay eggs?) it is actually a member of the Fujitsu-Siemens family, a Japanese-German relationship of a much more peaceful nature than the Axis of evil from WW2. While my two latest computers are not FS (the portable is Dell and the Monster is North Corporation), the previous 4 desktops were all Fujitsu-Siemens Scaleo of one sort or another. Generally I scaled up a little for each, so the name was kind of fitting. (And less childish than Storagebird, at least!) My experience with them is that they usually come with some kind of minor defect, which shows up either at start or fairly early, but apart from that they run out the warranty time and then some. Their disks have given me no trouble at all. I can always hope for the same here, but I admit it is not very likely. I have lost so many external hard disks now that I consider it an intrinsic nature of them to get the click of death within a year or two.

Luckily I have replaced the LaCie already, with a Maxtor no less. Admittedly a newer model than any of the two who have committed suicide at the Chaos Node, but still, I don't expect it to last out the two years of the law-mandate warranty. (In Norway. Your laws may vary.) So I plan to use the Storagebird to take periodic backups of the Maxtor. If I can remember to do this fairly regularly, only little will be lost when the everyday disk goes poof. Backing things up to DVDs tends to be so cumbersome that it only gets done with very static material.

The thing is, after almost a year, both of the internal hard disks are almost full. This is most critical for C:, which has the operating system as well as the various programs I've installed. So I should probably shuffle the content from D: over to the Maxtor (F:) and then move the /My documents/ folder over to D:. This is amazingly easy to do: You open the start menu, right-click My Docmuments, and choose Properties. Here you will find its current (not so obvious) address, and an option to move it. Be sure to jot down the original address, because a few ill-behaved programs will not get it and quietly save things at the old address. Most will, however, including (most important, of course) Sims 2. My folder is slightly more than 7 GB. I still have 4 GB free on disk C:, but virtual memory could possibly reach that size if I play Oblivion for hours or download a lot of custom content to Sims 2. (Also, custom content is saved in a subfolder of My Documents as well.)

Or I could, I suppose, buy a larger but slower internal hard disk for the Monster. But now that I have so many external, I think I'll use them. They will probably die before the warranty expires, like the earlier ones, but as long as I have enough of them to duplicate everything, this is not much of a problem. I guess I am starting to approach what professionals call a RAID - a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. Or at least they are inexpensive by Norwegian standards. Your standard of living may vary. We still need more workers up here, by the way. Some brain needed, but if you can read the Chaos Node without getting a headache, you probably will do fine. In fact, if you already knew what a RAID was, you would probably earn more than I do. Because I know, but I don't tell my boss.