lacie offers a 10TB network storage solution

[maverick]

lacie is offering a 10TB network storage solution.

while that may not sound significant, let me explain why this sounds pretty cool.

i remember that the first computer we got was the ibm pc portable. it was a portable that was bigger than today's roll aboard suitcases. that was sometime around 1984. you could get it with 256K or 640K of memory. we got the one with 256K - why would you ever need 640K of memory? it had a built in 5" monochrome display. it had two 5.25" floppy drives that took 360K floppy disks. drive a: took a disk with the operating system - ibm dos, and later ms dos. after you booted up, you would put the disk with the software you wanted to run into drive a: and you could store and read your data from a disk you would put into drive b:. the os loaded completely into memory. occasionally, you may have had the need to reinsert the os disk back into drive a: after exiting an application, but often you didn't.

we ran lotus 1-2-3 for spreadsheets, volkswriter and later wordperfect for word processing. we played loderunner, donkey kong, blue bush chess, and other games. it was a pretty amazing computer. it had a keyboard that clicked those loud ibm clicks. you could add a bus mouse by installing an adapter, but we didn't have one.

i think around 1989, we got an 80-386. if i remember correctly, it had 4MB of RAM, a 128MB hard drive, a 1.44MB 3.5" floppy drive, and a 14" color crt. we added a 9600 baud modem. it ran ms windows 3.0 that we later upgraded to 3.1.

128MB was a lot of space!

i remember in the late 1990s, my company purchased a sun a3500fc storage array that provided 1TB of raw space in a full height rack that sat in a data center. it wasn't the finest piece of equipment, but that's another story.

today you have laptops with a 500gb drive that is faster, smaller and way less costly than that 128MB drive, and 2TB 3.5" drives that are probably faster than that array from sun.

i know that for some time, emc and others have provided enterprise storage solutions where you can have a petabyte of high performance storage in the space of a couple of floor tiles in a data center. but today, we, as consumers, can get 10TB of storage in our homes across 5 drives in this little package.

wow!

[backpack]

Thanks for taking us back to memory lane, I had the same journey but with Apple.

[maverick]

Thanks for taking us back to memory lane, I had the same journey but with Apple.

in 1984, i was in 5th grade. my sister was doing her masters in information systems at american university, and i learned about computers through her. ibm was considered the business machine, for doing "real" work, i guess.

while i was exposed to macs in the early 1990's in college, i didn't take them seriously, using windows and later linux.

i got my first mac in the late 1990s - it was the "wallstreet" powerbook running mac os 8.6 and later os 9. but i was trying to get it behave like linux and windows rather than using it the way it was intended. that foray ended within a year.

i came back to the mac with an ibook running os 10 in 2001 or 2002. i haven't looked back since.

[pretzelb]

I think my first introduction to computers was the Apple II+. Man what a tank that was. What really amazes me today was the Apple IIc which had to be the first portable computer ever sold. The monitor was separate of course but still it was pretty impressive. I hooked my family on Apple but soon after college I got tired of trying to convince the world that Apple was better and went PC. As Maverick says, I've never looked back. I do like what Apple does in some cases, but the entire Apple superior attitude has always rubbed me the wrong way. The ad campaigns and fanatic users always give me a feel of Apple being the underdog who feels they are actually vastly superior to everyone else in all ways. Ultimately what kills it for me is the inability to upgrade something simple like memory.

I think if I hit the lottery and could retire I'd convert fully to Linux and tinker around. I ran my own home Linux server for a while and even had it playing the role of my firewall until I could no longer keep up on trying to learn more than one OS at a time.

Is it me or does that network storage device look like HAL from the movie?

[keb]

That is pretty amazing. I have a bunch of LaCie disks, some still in the box. Converted everyone in the house to Mac about a year ago and finally myself this past fall with the 15" unibody. Life is sooo much easier. Plus it is so easy to cut my kids off the internet on the Airport Extreme! The only product I never had any luck with was Time Capsule, but Time Machine on Leopard is a godsend. Am still working on some disk sharing in the house, upgrading everyone's backup drive, etc... No streaming movie center yet but as soon as my daughter upgrades from her MacMini that is getting plugged into an HDTV...

[pretzelb]

It's amazing what can drive me crazy.

I'm actually slightly upset because I have a good number of old hard drives that still work. Yes, I'm upset that something didn't break. With all these hard drives laying around it's hard for me to justify getting new storage. I even bought some enclosures that let you pop in the hard drive and create your own USB drive.

Well, the real problem is that I can't find a place to donate the old computer stuff to and I feel too bad just throwing out the electronics. I wish it were as easy as dropping clothes off at the Goodwill.

I'd really like to consolidate and get one network file solution for music, media, and backups but first I have to clean out the old junk. Maybe someday.

[keb]

Several of my external drives were drives from older computers that I took out and reformatted when the computers were done. I am replacing them on a rotating basis because drives are cheap, the newer ones are larger capacity in smaller and cooler (literally and figuratively) enclosures, and more importantly faster and quieter, and I don't really want to do what I have always done, which is wait for them to die before replacing them, which just makes more work for me. The problem with donating the old computer stuff is that by the time you can't use it anymore no one else wants it either, your kids don't want and can't use the older stuff, and the big computer cos have always seemed to do right by education and nonprofits.

[maverick]

Is it me or does that network storage device look like HAL from the movie?

it's not just you. there is definitely a quirky and likely intentional resemblance

[maverick]

It's amazing what can drive me crazy.

I'm actually slightly upset because I have a good number of old hard drives that still work. Yes, I'm upset that something didn't break. With all these hard drives laying around it's hard for me to justify getting new storage. I even bought some enclosures that let you pop in the hard drive and create your own USB drive.

Well, the real problem is that I can't find a place to donate the old computer stuff to and I feel too bad just throwing out the electronics. I wish it were as easy as dropping clothes off at the Goodwill.

I'd really like to consolidate and get one network file solution for music, media, and backups but first I have to clean out the old junk. Maybe someday.

there are a couple of options you can explore. have you talked to your local schools to see if they could use them?

you could try off loading them in a technology garage sale.

there is ebay and craigslist.

also take a look at freecycle - you'll be amazed at what is being offered and how many things you want to get rid of that others will find useful. i had offloaded a lot of things this way some time back.