Tuesday, September 09, 2008

stand by: home computer down

Modern computers have two parts that remain in constant motion while powered on - the fan, and the hard drive.

Guess which one failed on me late last week.

Thank goodness we had the "Apple Care" plan or I'd be shelling out cash for a replacement drive on top of the labor costs of removing the old one and installing the new.

As I am uncomfortable writing from work (where I am supposed to be, you know, working) I will beg your forgiveness as you endure this extended period of radio silence.

I wonder what a great big solid state drive would cost. . . hmm.

3 comments:

Alain Breillatt said...

"I wonder how much a big solid state drive would cost?"

More than you want to even contemplate - assuming this is for a MacBook.

href=https://www.expercom.com/show_page.html?STATIC_PAGE_ID=38

For the same cost you could get two 1.5 TB external drives with firewire connections.

Cypripedium said...

Assuming you want decent performance, and still want to run OSX,(cough*ubuntu*cough), but don't need much internal storage...

Looks like there's some options, but they're all above $200...

http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=636&Tpk=Solid%20State%20Drive

Christopher Painter said...

I have a quad core server at home with 4 drives. 2 in RAID 1 and 2 in RAID 0.

I keep the Hyper-V server along with important VM's on the RAID1 ( Domain Controller, SQL Server, TFS Server, Application/File Server ) and backup copies of the VHDs used to create my build and test VM's.

On the RAID 0, I keep my VM's for build and installation testing for ultimate performance.

For my most important information ( mostly SQL Database that run TFS ) I use an online backup system for offsite storage.

The harddrives cost me less then $400 and the online backup service costs me about $200/yr.

It's priceless to me considering the amount of consulting I do and how valuable that code is and how important it is to deliver on time.