Brian's World

1 Down, 1 to Go

Today was the last day at work for one of my two managers, probably the manager that gives us the most work and checks in with us on a daily basis. Adding to the confusion, the other manager is leaving at the end of June. What will we do? I dunno, but it certainly will be interesting. Today I spent the whole day writing an Excel Macro, its a pretty beastly macro and takes a few minutes to run; my first macro writing experience. Less than pleasurable programming.

Onto my personal computing vendettas, file storage. Right now my external hard drive has less than 25gb of space left, and I’m not very pleased. I’ve been seeking an upgrade for a few months but I’m really not sure the approach to take. The cheap way is to buy another firewire hard drive but thats not a very effective long term solution or an efficient way to solve the problem. Idea 2 would be seeking a RAID 5 option, 3-5 reasonably sized hard drives. This requires a few things, a) money. b) hard drives. c) raid controller. If I’m going to make this investment, I’m certainly going to need somewhere to put them all because they won’t fit in my microform pc so If I’m buying an external inclosure I could just make the leap to a seperate file server. Then I run into performance issues with my currently ethernet/wireless based network but I do achieve the connectivity I want. The performance issues really slide me into a firewire solution’s, see the loop here. And part of me is like wait 3 years (yea right), the whole database file storage will take off and you’ll have to adjust again.

I’d really like to setup a fiber network at home, but the though of that makes me laugh.

If the internet was fast I would consider consolidating all of my stuff into one master server, with RAID 5, backup UPS, etc, but the internet just isn’t fast enough for me to record live TV over it, the buffer would cause issues. I plan on doing some hop exploration, seeing if I can find shorter static routing paths between me and my frequently visited sites. No, I haven’t taken any advanced Cisco networking classes, but I’d like to.

Hardware thoughts would be greatly appreciated?

I’m tired and my throat tickles, time for bed.