Why I Hate the Computer Industry

Ok, so my earlier relief about the computer that houses arcterex.net being ok has been unfounded. A couple of lockups tonight were isolated to a hard drive that was dying, and after it was pulled out and attached to a different system, died. An 80G drive that probably cost me $200 a year decided that it wasn’t going to boot. Not a huge deal, it was part of a RAID5 array so no data was lost (my mp3 collection is on that array….).


So tomorrow I will pick up a replacement. The joy of this of course is that I just need to partition it and then do a raidhotadd and it’ll go in just dandy and it’ll be like nothing ever happened. So I’m looking at a couple of websites, trying to decide if I should get a drive of the same size to keep things simple, or something larger so I have extra room



  • if the other drives go
  • if I get more drives in the future for more storage space

So lets compare the prices (from atic.ca):

  • Western Digital 80G 8M ATA 7200rpm (what I had before): $94.00
  • Seagate 200G 8M ATA 7200rpm: $150

50% price increase for 250% capacity increase. I hate this industry!


Naked is now sitting on the desk, not in the corner, directly in the path of the window fan, and hopefully being kept cool enough that she can outlast this heat wave.