Electron Hut: Kyle Bedell’s Blog

My Dad’s computer finally decided to commit suicide last Sunday. This didn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone, as the machine had been running at a speed roughly equivalent to that of a bug attempting to escape from a molasses flood. Further investigation revealed that not only had a stick of RAM in the machine gone bad, the power supply had died from heat exposure and there were some solder joints on the motherboard that obviously weren’t performing their duties properly. Since the machine was a late-era Pentium 4 box that was hot, inefficient, and noisy, we decided to set him up with a Shuttle SD39P2 barebones with a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo. It’s running Vista Home Premium now, and has been surprisingly stable thus far, not to mention much faster than the old machine.

Now, this brings me to the reason for the title of said post. My dad is a bit paranoid when it comes to backing up his photos, and recent ran out of room on his smallish external hard drive to back them up to. It was never big enough to hold everything to begin with, you see. So, because his PC died, he decided to invest in a BuffaloTech TerraStation Live, two terrabytes (well, really 1.46TB, because the drives are in a RAID 5 (parity) configuration) of gigabit Ethernet-linked network storage. Needless to say, it now serves as the data repository of the household. It’s plenty fast, runs on Linux with an awesome web interface, and had a multitude of multimedia-broadcasting and FTP features to boot.

If you need a lot of networked storage, this is a great solution.

-Kyle