Brother Matt said regarding my bad luck w/ gadgets that that is a sign that I need to simplify… If it was only that simple…

  • 2007-12-27 PC Recycling
    2007-12-27 PC Recycling
  • 2007-12-27 PC Recycling - adding drives to my Macintosh
    2007-12-27 PC Recycling – adding drives to my Macintosh
  • 2007-12-27 PC Recycling - adding drives to my blue lucite PC case and boring beige case
    2007-12-27 PC Recycling – adding drives to my blue lucite PC case and boring beige case
  • 2007-12-27 PC Recycling - assorted parts
    2007-12-27 PC Recycling – assorted parts
  • 2007-12-27 PC Recycling - Macintosh mid-hard drive testing
    2007-12-27 PC Recycling – Macintosh mid-hard drive testing

So, how did I spend my Christmas day and the week? Juls’ computer at home hasn’t been working for a couple weeks and my son is soon going to be moving to Northern California sans-computer, so I decided to put together two systems for them from the various retired PC hardware bits tucked away in my apartment. Yeah, I’m a geek. Simplify, ha! Now my apartment is buried under with the bones of three dismantled PCs in the pursuit of putting together two other systems. Ack.

Simplify. Hmmm. So the only way I know how untangle my home tech knot is to spell out what I have going on. Doesn’t make for great prose or narrative, but that’s why I put this after the blog “fold.” So here’s the breakdown:

  • MacBook Pro: My main productivity system whose only shortcoming is it’s limited hard disk space (120 GB).
    Solution:
    • 250GB External MyBook Hard Drive: I’ve augmented the hard disk space with an external MyBook hard disk (250 GB) used by Time Machine for automatic system back up
    • 250GB External WD minidrive: This drive travels with me and I use it to store my iTunes, photos and school related stuff. I love my little black WD external drive.
  • MacMini: Connected to my big-tube TV and stereo, this Mac is my digital hub playing my DVDs, stored movies, iTunes and syncs with my iPhone. Alas, like the MacBook Pro, it has a pitifully small hard drive (120 GB). Solution:
    • Four G4 Network Drives: Previously I connected the MacMini to my G4 Tower (see below) across the network to access the G4’s four hard drives where my iTunes library and movies were stored.
    • 1TB External MyBook Hard Drive: Lately, however, the network connection has been dropping off unexpectedly, so I added a 1TB MyBook external hard drive to store additional media (StarTrek Classic, TNG & DS9 all seasons).
  • G4 Tower: Formerly my media-hub but as the OSes moved on this box couldn’t keep up and started dropping frames in DVD-playback. The G4 would have been retired a long time ago except that it’s so damn easy to add hard disks and is thousands of times quieter than my noisy PCs that it became my media server (the back-end where the media files are stored versus the front-end media hub which plays the files). After I added a 500GB internal hard drive, however, the G4 was a bit slow in the boot-up/restart and I began to worry that the power supply was not up pushing four internal hard drives, a DVD-burner, Zip-drive, two video-cards, a USB2/Firewire card and an IDE card to make the extra two hard drives work. Assets:
    • 160GB Hard Drive: Currently used for iTunes
    • 200GB Hard Drive: Currently storing photos and iPhoto libraries
    • 500GB Hard Drive: Currently storing ripped DVDs
    • 300GB Hard Drive: Currently storing video projects and archives
  • Various External Hard Drives:
    • 300GB One Touch Maxtor: Previously used to back up the MacBook Pro, until I switched to Leopard…
    • 400 GB Network-Access Storage: Used to store ripped DVDs… not nearly as many as I had originally had hoped.
"Disused" PC cases in storage in my apartment - 2007
“Disused” PC cases in storage in my apartment – 2007

Situation: So, the G4 is showing it’s age and I’d like to reduce the number of machines and have a direct connection between the MacMini Media Hub and the media. I forgot to mention that I have an old blue CRT iMac that I have around so that I can run the occasional OS9 app (truthfully it’s for Age of Empires… before they had version numbers). And I was running a noisy PC on my second 19″ LCD, until I got the Matrox DualHead2Go to work with the MacBookPro (it was the Apple video output adapter!)

  • Solution A: More External Hard Drives. Just keep buying external hard drives and retire the G4. Simple, there’s an added concern, except for the main drive on my MacBookPro, nothing is getting backed up for when the computer or hard drive goes down. Also there’s the waste of all those perfectly good hard drives presently running in the G4. As it is, I’ve taken one of the hard drives (that used to house my iTunes library) and have drafted it to become the main hard drive of my son’s PC. Solution A would reduce the number of machine to the MacBookPro (for productivity) and the MacMini (Media Hub), but I’m eventually going to run out of desk space for all the external drives and whatever gets stored there runs the risk of getting lost, should/when the drive fails. Simple, but inelegant.
  • Solution B: Drobo “Data Robot.“Instead of piling up more external hard drives and wasting the perfectly good drives already in service I can put all the drives into the Drobo, connect it (via USB2) to the MacMini and besides providing for expandable hard disk capacity, the Drobo backs up all the data, spreading it among the installed disks so that if/when a disk is lost the data is not lost. So, the MacBook Pro keeps it two external drives and the MacMini will have a 1TB external drive and the Drobo with four internal hard drives. I’ll also keep the G4 around to run the occasional OS9 app. That’s a reduction from five computers (MacBook Pro, MacMini, G4 Tower, PC, iMac) to two, some times three computers.

Simplify. Why is it that simplifying things costs so much? Damn. JBB