I haven't mentioned it hear but I've been without my Raid Array for a couple months now. If you recall, I finally had one put together using 5 2-terrabyte drives, giving me a little less than 8 terrabytes of storage. I've had a long and sordid history with hard drives and experienced a couple of traumatic experiences in my life regarding them. When I was still in Chicago, in the space of around a year and a half, I managed to have 3 different Western Digital hard drives die on me. In each case they were all full of non-retrievable information and it all went poof. Upon returning to Joisey I had another computer hard drive die which took with it all my pictures and old emails among other things. The end result from those experiences is that I've become a bit paranoid when it comes to data storage. Unfortunately, the need to avoid that sort of disaster would clash with my cheapness. I just couldn't bring myself to buy multiple drives which would hold the exact same information and so I continued to walk the tightrope.

I'm not sure when I first heard of RAID systems, but the idea is that you string together a bunch of hard drives and each one has a little duplicate information that is on the others. The idea is that if any one drive dies, you can replace it and not actually lose any of your data. If more than one dies at the same time, well, then you're completely screwed. I had finally bit the bullet, spending around $800 to buy a Raid array and the hard drives to fill it a while back but had all sorts of connection issues. Basically, the mini-usb interface kept breaking down and snapping, which would often lock up my computer and make it crash. My cousin suggested investing some more money and building a network box so that the entire system would be wireless. This ended up costing another $200 and also took a really long time to hash out since he's a major procrastinator.

Well, this past weekend he finally called and said he was finished. He ran the new system over here and after a couple hours of installation following by some additional troubleshooting over the phone, I'm up and running with my Raid array again. On top of that I had bought some additional Ram for my laptop a while back and he slotted those inf or me as well meaning that I've now got 8GBs hooked up. All in all, I couldn't be happier. As far as I'm concerned, everything is now hunky dorey as far as the whole laptop side of things go and I can't think of needing anything else. All I hope now is that everything continues running for as long as it can, knock on wood, and if a drive has to die in the array it decides to go on its own rather than entering into some sort of group suicide pact. I've been taking the opportunity to download tons of old reality shows so I'll always have them on hand and can go back to them whenever I want. So far I'm snagging and/or planning to snag:

• Top Chef


• Top Chef: Masters


• Top Chef: Just Desserts


• The Amazing Race


• Bull Run


• The Deadliest Catch


• Hell's Kitchen


• Kitchen Nightmares


• The Apprentice


• Survivor


• Dual Survivor


• The Colony


• Gold Rush

I'm sure there are others I haven't even thought of yet but this along will probably take weeks. After that it'll be time to snag all the various tv series i've meant to watch over the years but never gotten around to. People have raved about shows like Dexter or House, which I've never seen so much as a single episode of and it's time I fixed that, as well as save them all for posterity.