Big Hard Drive Project: Finally!
Thursday, 15 May 2008 11:54![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maugornSo sometime back I established that the great big hard drive for all of my audio project was feasible. If I put all of my gigs and albums on one big hard drive (with periodic backing up to CD), I could access it equally easily from both the Windows and Linux partitions.
And in the meantime, my main hard drives would be free for all the other stuff I do and I wouldn't have space issues there as the price of admission to get into audio on my computer.
So it all worked, and worked decently well.
All I needed to do was to now find a great big hard drive that wouldn't just be consumed as soon as I put all the projects on it. The external 60gb Iomega drive from my uncle almost fit the bill, but I filled it up as soon as I got all of my gig recordings on it. AND it turned out to be be a bit unstable when it was that full. Boo!
So then I got a drive off of Ebay, and for quite a bargain, I thought I'd be okay.
Nope. All it does is go "click click click click click click click click click click whirr," but then never shows up anywhere. So, once I had some income from Spoutwood, I broke down and bought a brand new 500gb drive from Microcenter.
First it went clickclickclickclick and never showed up anywhere.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jmax315 suggested that I *had* in fact acquired two crappy drives in a row. madbodger provided a second opinion that *maybe* the little power supply that came with the external USB hard drive adapter thingie just wasn't studly enough to power a really big drive.
So I dug up a pile of old PC power supplies, and couldn't find one that would work w/out a motherboard. Someday I'm gonna have to figure out how to bypass that, because these are perfectly good power supplies with a zillion and one uses, and it really should not be this difficult to make one work "outside the box".
Not to be thwarted, I broke down and bought a Y/extension for the power cables inside my computer and ran the cable out of the computer and hooked the great big brand new hard drive to it... and...
...
It started smoking.
Boo!
I established that there was, in fact nothing wrong with the power by powering up a different drive, and then headed over to Microcenter hoping that they would not give me grief when I tried to exchange this headliner of the "bathtub-shaped failure curve" for a drive that actually worked.
Again, they have proven themselves worthy. The fellow who dealt with me was smart, courteous, understanding, and very willing to replace the drive AND send it back to test that it worked for me. I like Microcenter. They seem to have everything one could want, knowledge of it, and are willing to sell it to you for not alot of money. They *will* try to "upsell" you stuff that's more expensive if you're trying to do things on the cheap, but WTF, selling is their job, y'know? And they back off when you insist on staying within budget, so it's not so bad to be offered options if they exist. Anyway, they're everything that CompUSA facilely pretended to, with much less bullshit too!
And now the great big new hard drive is sitting on top of my computer, chirping happily and humming away as all of my audio projects are being uploaded to it. It's taking a stoopidly long time to do, as there do seem to be an awful lot of very big files, but once it's done, my audio work will be streamlined and I probably won't have to worry much about storage space for at least a year!
And in the meantime, my main hard drives would be free for all the other stuff I do and I wouldn't have space issues there as the price of admission to get into audio on my computer.
So it all worked, and worked decently well.
All I needed to do was to now find a great big hard drive that wouldn't just be consumed as soon as I put all the projects on it. The external 60gb Iomega drive from my uncle almost fit the bill, but I filled it up as soon as I got all of my gig recordings on it. AND it turned out to be be a bit unstable when it was that full. Boo!
So then I got a drive off of Ebay, and for quite a bargain, I thought I'd be okay.
Nope. All it does is go "click click click click click click click click click click whirr," but then never shows up anywhere. So, once I had some income from Spoutwood, I broke down and bought a brand new 500gb drive from Microcenter.
First it went clickclickclickclick and never showed up anywhere.
jmax315 suggested that I *had* in fact acquired two crappy drives in a row. madbodger provided a second opinion that *maybe* the little power supply that came with the external USB hard drive adapter thingie just wasn't studly enough to power a really big drive.So I dug up a pile of old PC power supplies, and couldn't find one that would work w/out a motherboard. Someday I'm gonna have to figure out how to bypass that, because these are perfectly good power supplies with a zillion and one uses, and it really should not be this difficult to make one work "outside the box".
Not to be thwarted, I broke down and bought a Y/extension for the power cables inside my computer and ran the cable out of the computer and hooked the great big brand new hard drive to it... and...
...
It started smoking.
Boo!
I established that there was, in fact nothing wrong with the power by powering up a different drive, and then headed over to Microcenter hoping that they would not give me grief when I tried to exchange this headliner of the "bathtub-shaped failure curve" for a drive that actually worked.
Again, they have proven themselves worthy. The fellow who dealt with me was smart, courteous, understanding, and very willing to replace the drive AND send it back to test that it worked for me. I like Microcenter. They seem to have everything one could want, knowledge of it, and are willing to sell it to you for not alot of money. They *will* try to "upsell" you stuff that's more expensive if you're trying to do things on the cheap, but WTF, selling is their job, y'know? And they back off when you insist on staying within budget, so it's not so bad to be offered options if they exist. Anyway, they're everything that CompUSA facilely pretended to, with much less bullshit too!
And now the great big new hard drive is sitting on top of my computer, chirping happily and humming away as all of my audio projects are being uploaded to it. It's taking a stoopidly long time to do, as there do seem to be an awful lot of very big files, but once it's done, my audio work will be streamlined and I probably won't have to worry much about storage space for at least a year!
