I hate the computer business..

[theducks]

Everything is so cheap, buggy and commoditised, or insanely expensive.

Case in point: I want a bunch of 400GB USB2 or Firewire hard drives. Now, I could pay $628 (+shipping) for one from Zytech. Or, I could buy a drive for $357 and an enclosure for $99. But would it work? It might. But you can never trust it. The vendor of the case will blame the drive, and the vendor of the drive will (rightly) blame the vendor of the enclosure.

I wish I could just buy PC components and have them act as expected.

Comments

[koyote.livejournal.com]

I agree with you on the computer business as a whole and I think it is largely deliberate.

That being said, how I'd do it if it was me is:

cheapish decent used quality pc tower (something around a athlon 800 or soish.)
dual ethernet or even a gig e
sata controller card(s)
stack of 5 reliable drives in that case - one IDE whatever for the bsd, 4 for mirroring (or raid 5 if you want, but you already bought the spare drive, right? 2 of them, even, because you'll never find them again!)


if this was on a quicksilver or later powermac, I'd just dump 2 to 4 drives (depending) internally.

I don't really fall in love with firewires drives in general as an online serious storage solution. (that being said, i'm hunting for someone who has an older one in the 20-60gb range to give it to me since I need one for the ibook so I cna put my work lab installs on it to make my job (at apple) easier.)

[theducks.livejournal.com]

It's mostly for backups, not day-to-day usage, and I want three seperate drives/enclosures, since they will end up in physically dissimilar locations. But if it was for large scale storage, I think I'd still go firewire, for latency.