Western Digital announced a 3TB external drive awhile back, this week they announce a internal 3TB Caviar Green Drive. While I have no need for the drive at this time I have to admit I’m curios. As the reviews I link to at the end mention, there’s a 2.9TB barrier with most systems these days. Western Digital provides a controller board with the disk in order to get around the issue. The bottom line is, review the pitfalls before spending your money. Or better yet, wait for others to clarify [...] Read the rest »
New Laptop Joins the Quest: The Choice
I'd been without a capable laptop since my Macbook drank a cup of coffee over a year ago. It was time to get something more capable than my iPad or a netbook so I began searching for a laptop. While I didn't need something for my most demanding needs, I did want something that wouldn't tie me to a desk for 80% of my computer work. This article lays out my requirements and the choice I made, a Dell Inspiron 15R. Read the rest »
School of Hard (Drive) Knocks – Part 2
At the beginning of the month I wrote about my Windows Home Server hard drive problems and at the time I was waiting for WHS to finish removing the bad drive from its storage pool. When I posted the article I was letting Windows Home Server run through the drive removal process while I slept. I had pulled the plug on the bad drive since it brought the server to its knees and was now trying to remove the traces of it from the pool. When I woke up in [...] Read the rest »
School of Hard (Drive) Knocks
One of the problems with having a Windows Home Server with 12 hard drives is that hard drives do fail and there’s a dozen chances for that to happen. Add to that the 18TB of data those drives can hold and things are further complicated. The odds are not in my favor and it’s only a matter of time. I’d been thinking about that recently and had just begun looking at ways to monitor the drive health when I came across some health problems while testing out some tools. I [...] Read the rest »
1.5TB Drives at 1TB Drive Prices
I noticed that the Seagate 1.5TB Barracuda drives have hit NewEgg and are priced at $190 with free shipping. That’s less than 13¢/GB. The 1TB Seagate drive is priced at $140 which is 14¢/GB making the new 1.5TB drives a better per gigabyte value. I haven’t bought one but I as shocked to see the new technology at a reasonable price. I realize I have a problem, because while I don’t need the space I want one of these drives. Read the rest »
The OS Quest Trail Log #24: Hardware and Software Updates Edition
Another busy week on the OS Quest but a lot of it felt like running in place due to the continued onslaught of software updates. The big updates, at least based on size and time, were OS X 10.5.2 and the follow-up Leopard Graphics Update. There were two other big updates, based on the software and features delivered, Aperture 2 and Apple TV Take 2. There were also the minor updates – Microsoft Patch Tuesday, a minor update for Yojimbo, and iLife ’08 update. In among these updates I moved [...] Read the rest »
