My Tech Milestones, as Measured by Hard Drive Capacity

My computer and technology milestones are usually imprinted on my brain by the purchase of a new hard drive. For geeks that have what I call the "Archivist Gene" (like myself) tend to be digital packrats. We file, store, organize, and keep safe from entropy information because we can. In the case of the lossless live music guys (etree.org, Furthur), we, or at least I, felt a cultural and historical obligation of preserving digital audio. Geographic redundancy just happened to be a happy happenstance. But that's offtopic.

I vividly recall the family's first computer, some 8088 clone, and it's fantastic 20MB harddisk, circa 1988. I think the pricetag was still on the bottom of the drive, $350.

I can remember the joy of having a separate 6GB D:\ drive on my FTP server, sparkle.etree.org, dedicated to sharing only SHN files, back around 1998 or so. I could literally hosts five or six shows at a time!

When hard disks broke the $1/GB barrier around the end of 2002, I can remember telling non-geek friends what an important milestone it was. I remember getting the phonecall from a buddy in spring 2005 telling me to get my ass over to CompUSA because they had 400GB Seagate drives for $150 without a mail-in rebate. Walking out of a store with over 1TB under your arm was a big deal!

So fastforward to now, November 2008. Election Day. I ordered two 1.5TB drives from Amazon (Seagate ST31500341AS), to be installed as a RAID1 (mirrored) in my Media Center XP HTPC. I've been rolling the downtime dice for the past two years by not having a mirrored operating system drive. Currently, an old 160GB IDE is the program drive, and two newer SATA are music and video drives, 400GB and 300GB respectively. Video I don't care about, as it's just DVR stuff. Music is copied over to an external 750GB drive every few months. But automated backup/mirroring is the ultimate goal.

So now I'm thinking, program/operating system on a smallish partition (30GB), then the rest as a music partition. All mirrored. Hardware-failure proof, at least in theory. I'll migrate the DVR stuff to the 400GB drive, and keep the 300GB drive as a spare.

In other news, the Newbie Net podcast should functional, the subscribe link is over on the Newbie Net page. Next comes streaming audio via an embedded Flash player, which isn't working as easily for me as it should.