March 16, 2009: 1.5TB More Storage

Today was no less busy that I have been over the past week.  Another day of getting up and go go go all day long.  At least I did not get so busy that I forget to book my time for the week.  I hate when that happens.  Then it takes a month before I end up getting paid again.

I have been doing so much “work” on the SpiceWorks forums over the past week that I have won myself a T-shirt!

I ordered a new, external hard drive today.  A Seagate with 1.5TB.  This is the largest storage device that I have ever owned.  Currently I own one .25TB drive, three .5TB drives and two .75TB drives but this is at least double the size of the next largest drive – and I still imagine that I will eat through all of the available space in no time at all.  I am currently using 1.75TB just for media storage and I am severely limited by it.  It is crazy that I can use so much but I really do.  All of my drives are completely full to the point that I cannot transfer video from my camcorder or anything.  It is quite a problem.

So this new hard drive is a stop gap measure to provide some desperately needed additional storage until a more permament solution can be afforded.  I am thinking that this drive will be attached to my desktop and that very soon an additional 1.5TB external drive will be purchased which will get attached to Dominica’s laptop.

Speaking of Dominica’s laptop – it gave us quite a scare tonight.  It refused to book after she updated a software package on it and we were sure that we were going to have to completely rebuild it which is not at all what we wanted to spend out evening doing.  It turned out, though, that it was my iPod which was plugged into the laptop that was causing the problem and interrupting the boot process.  Once I took the laptop elsewhere to be worked on it booted fine – because the iPod is plugged into the docking station.  It took me a while to put two and two together to figure out what was happening.  Dominica is definitely thinking about doing a bigtime backup of her system now, though!

After my long day of work was finally over and I was able to come upstairs and relax I put in several hours trying to get to the bottom of some really crazy WMI issues that I am having with a lot of workstations.  The problems appear to stem from using Microsoft’s Live OneCare firewall product.  It appears to block WMI communications no matter what I do or how I configure it.  It is very frustrating.  I burned most of the evening working on that.

We have been so busy the last several weeks that there has not been a spare moment to work on the model trains at all.  For a little while there we were getting lots of time to work on them and it was going really well.  Now that we finished the initial diorama we haven’t even had a chance to get started on the beginnings of any of the building models or the layout itself that we are going to do.  Parts of it are sitting all over the house completely in the way because we want to do it but just don’t have the time.

Dominica really wanted to go grocery shopping today as we are extremely low on foodstuffs but Liesl never took any type of nap all day and even if she had I really had no spare time with which to have watched her at all.  So I suppose that that kind of worked out but only barely.  She is really hoping that she will be able to make it out of the house tomorrow to get food.  We are scraping the bottom of the barrel here trying to put meals together and one of the things that we are running out of is our vegetables which is pretty bad.  You don’t want to get into a situation where all there is to eat is junk food and snacks!

It was really late by the time that I was finally able to get away from everything and head off to bed.  I can tell that tomorrow is going to be another really long day and I am going to be pretty tired.

We have not heard anything from my cousin Sara yet who has been threatening to come down and visit this week.  She could come down as early as Wednesday or possibly not at all.  Dad is thinking about coming down in a week from today.  Liesl has a lot of visitors recently.  She is getting spoiled.

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2 Comments

  1. Hey Scott – let me know about that seagate 1.5 and data loading speeds – was thinking of getting a 1 TB and 3 1GB Chips for the desktop we have (120 + 149 vs. $700 for a new laptop)

    peace

    Phildo

  2. The speeds are not the best but that is really a combination of it being connected via USB and that it spins down when not in use so you have to make a request to it and have it spin up before it begins to transfer anything. For storage it works perfectly well but as a main drive it might be a little annoying.

    I would splurge for the 1.5TB over the 1TB, though, you get more storage per dollar and once you have storage like this you are likely to find yourself using it rather quickly. I need to get my second 1.5TB drive ordered very soon. Few weeks, I hope.

    If you are really concerned about the speed of an external drive, consider getting an eSATA card and an eSATA external drive – much faster transfer rates.

    Or, if you can squeeze it, get an internal drive. They are cheaper anyway.

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