My server has a lot of storage space. Most people seem to be happy when they have 80 gigs on their desktop. Heck, that’s just my secondary drive with another 60 gigs for the primary. My server, on the other hand, is filled with several hard drives of varying capacity from 120 GB to 250 GB. But my sporadic storage purchasing habits (“Hey, look. Another sale on 160GB hard drives. I can always use another”) has left me with several large capacity drives with no particular use. That is, until now.
My (former) roommate Brian once mentioned the idea of getting an external USB enclosure. Last I had checked they were in the $150 – $200 range, but he assured me that you could pick one up for $20 these days. As with all of my purchases, I made up my mind immediately, but took months to look at all the possibilities anyway. That’s led to a great deal of wasted bandwidth transfering gigs of mp3s between work and home, not to mention never having the pictures I want on my person at any given time.
The other day, however, I started sorting through various drives at work to put into a machine being reassembled. Unfortunately I wasn’t sure what was what and couldn’t install the new OS until all the data was definitely backed up. Since ripping apart yet another machine just to check out the contents of the drive was out of the question, everything just sat around in a state of lifelessness. Then it hit me – why not pick up one of those devices for work? Sure $80 unit on the shelf the other day seemed to pricey, but this would be pruchsed by work, and I could simply use it at home, too, until I found the perfect unit for myself (I was hoping to get a USB-powered enclosure for starters). Besides, the usefulness at work would easily justify that expense.
This time around, though, CompUSA had one of their self-branded, repackaged devices for $40 that was even sleeker looking than the more expensive unit from the other day. And guess what? It works! I’m now going through hard drives with great ease. And after a simple disconnect, I can power down the unit, swap in another drive, and keep on working through the stack. Even better still, I held onto a 120 GB drive Mike picked up for me out of a vendor’s “as is” pile for $25. I never got it to work in a computer, but it’s working in this thing. Now I have a whole assortment of storage units for backing up and transfering gobs of info wherever I need it. It’s like a technological revolution of the geek kind (wait, isn’t that redundant?).