I have not set London Stabbie on this one because the computer was a gift, assembled for me by our friend in Singapore. HWMBO carried it on the plane all the way from Singapore to London. And, for about 6 months it’s been my main computer while I try to get some stuff off the old one and onto the new one.
Of course, I’ve been backing it up daily, which seems to have been, in hindsight, a very good idea. Last night the larger 1.5TB hard disk crapped the bed. I am still able to use the computer with the smaller SSD disk, and if I need to save anything I can do that to a SD card while I consider what to do.
I am tempted to buy a 2 TB hard disk and swap it into the computer. However, I suspect that one of the fans is not very efficient or something of the sort, and thus the new one will follow the old one into hard disk hell.
I am considering the “cloud” (this year’s buzzword), but am not convinced that my data will be safe, secure, and instantly available when I want it.
I’m also somewhat vindicated in my former stance that buying a computer from a vendor (who can then be relied on for at least a year’s warranty) is somewhat safer than building your own machine. Fine words butter no parsnips, though—I need to think about this quite seriously.
Any thoughts? How should I provide myself with good, comprehensive computing ability? Is the cloud the only way forward?
When I filled up all of the space on my Mini’s hard drive, I added a wireless extension drive, a two Terabyte device from Seagate. It is sort of NAS — you do have a wifi network, don’t you — and it works well both as expansion and as back-up. It sits there (actually, in my coat closet), a little black monolith, radiating heat. If anything should happen to it, I can pull the monolith part off of the base — which retains your seetup — and slap a new one in its place, no additional setup required.
It is slow, though.
It’s certainly a possibility, although the “slow” part gives me pause. My backup is hard-wired into the network and, so far, has worked well and thus I’m OK with the backup part. What I’m annoyed about is that the SSD is so small (because serious space on an SSD is quite expensive) that another HDD is required. I confess that I’m also rather lazy about opening up the box and rooting around in it. So the separate HDD is very tempting. I’ll look at prices here.
Thanks for commenting—it’s very helpful and kind of you.