Last week I ordered one of these:

As far as I know it doesn’t come with the cute boy. But that could be a great bonus (Data Robotics, take note)!

It’s supposed to be arriving today, along with a nifty 500 gig drive that only cost me about a hundred bucks. I had no idea that terabytes were so inexpensive these days. When did this happen!? I guess I just haven’t had a hardware upgrade in awhile. Quite overdue. What fun!

So I’ve stripped down two of my external drives in preparation for feeding them to my robot, and I will probably strip the third after I see that everything’s working well. I have another external drive around here somewhere that I can use, too, but hell if I know where it ended up. Closet digging time?

In other news, I reorganized the office again. Furniture is delicious. (And now I have room for a data robot!)

[Edit: Oops! My old external drives were ATA drives and aren’t compatible with the Drobo. The new one is fine, so I ordered a second... and it looks like I’ll be keeping those externals around after all. For the first time in my life, I’m going to have a terabyte all in one place. Crazy!!]

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.