As with all impending purchases of hardware, I’ve been obsessing non-stop about the Drobo in Virtual Magpie’s future.

We’ve been doing our backups with external drives (SmartDisk CrossFire 250s, recommended by a friend who knows his stuff—these drives have proven incredibly reliable), but for the last few months I’ve been thinking of putting together a better solution, of which the Drobo is an obvious first step. (If you’re not already familiar with it, you might want to take a look at their website. It takes a few minutes for non-techies to mete out exactly what it does, but it’s well worth the exploration. This thing is awesome.)

Now, if you know anything about Megan, you know that her hardware obsession doesn’t stay dormant in her office after she stops working for the day.

Last week, very much in possession of an ass-kicking sinus infection, I had a dream about the Drobo. It was about my remaining hard drive space, and how I might improve on that free space. Sleeping, I was analyzing files for deletion or removal to DVD. More extra space, I needed to free up more space. In the dream (as always) it was very important to me to have the largest possible amount of empty space available.

Of course, being in possession of said ass-kicking sinus infection meant that it was necessary, at a certain point in the wee hours of the morning, to wake up enough to climb out of bed and hack something up—a particularly large glob of sinus obstruction, in this case. It was awe-inspiringly gross, even in my semi-somnolent state. A gigantic gob of ew. Into a tissue it went; thence to the trash can.

And as I hobbled through hypnogogia, back to my bed, I thought: Dude. I bet that freed up a ton of drive space.